Aiming at the problem of target lost caused by occlusion in infrared aerial target tracking,combined with the shortcoming that kernel correlation filter(KCF) tracking algorithm is unable to estimate object scale,a method of infrared aerial target tracking method based on KCF is proposed.In this method,the Sobel operator is used to extract the edge information of the target extended region by using the target position estimated by KCF,so as to obtain target scale and perform secondary positioning.Then,to judge whether the target is occluded or lost,frame difference method is used to detect the target to ensure the continuous tracking.The proposed algorithm is tested for 7 video sequences,and the results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively calculate the scale and verify the effectiveness of tracking in various environments.The average tracking speed is up to 44 frames per second,which can meet the real-time requirements.The proposed method has certain practical significance for infrared aerial target tracking.