Complex background is a major factor in the performance of the infrared search and tracking system. In this paper, an infrared clutter suppression method based on multi-resolution bilateral filter is proposed to solve the problem. Firstly, nonsubsampled contourlet transfrom is adopted to decompose the input infrared scene images, which extracts multi-scale and directional detail features of the image. Then, according to the difference between target and background clutter signal, bilateral filter is introduced to suppress background details and enhance target information for suppression background. Several groups of experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect the infrared target image effectively, compared with classical infrared scene background suppression methods, such as two-dimensional least means square.