Due to the influence of material limitation, immature process and environmental factors, the infrared image has the problems of poor contrast and low signal-to-noise ratio, which reduces the quality of infrared image and affects the ability to extract useful information from infrared images. In order to solve this problem, the traditional propagation filter is improved in this paper. The propagation mode is perfected to eight-neighborhood, and the method to judge the propagation along the inclined direction is added. The method of nonlinear transformation can better protect the edge information of infrared image, suppress isolated noise points and improve the quality of infrared image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves both subjective vision and objective evaluation.