Real-time small infrared (IR) target detection is critical to the performance of the situa-tional awareness system in high-altitude aircraft. However, current IR target detection systems are generally hardware-unfriendly and have difficulty in achieving a robust performance in datasets with clouds occupying a large proportion of the image background. In this paper, we present new results by using an efficient method that extracts the candidate targets in the pre-processing stage and fuses the local scale, blob-based contrast map and gradient map in the detection stage. We also developed mid-wave infrared (MWIR) and long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras for data collection experiments and algorithm evaluations. Experimental results using both publicly available datasets and image sequences acquired by our cameras clearly demonstrated that the proposed method achieves high detection accuracy with the mean AUC being at least 22.3% higher than comparable methods, and the computational cost beating the other methods by a large margin. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.