In this paper, an infrared target adaptive detection method based on the receptive field and lateral inhibition (LI) of the human visual system is proposed. In the proposed method, the direction parameters of a Gabor filter are adaptively determined according to the gradient direction, so that edges in the image can be detected without manual intervention. Meanwhile, background prediction based on LI is used for regulating the gray value in the image to achieve background suppression and target enhancement. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can extract both the small target and the area target from a complex background, and has satisfactory target detection ability.