A compressed sampling matrix decomposition-based infrared small target detection method in the technical field of image processing comprises the following steps: 1, inputting an infrared small target image, solving the information entropy of the image and performing rank estimation according to the information entropy of the image; 2, performing column vectorization on the image, and performing compressed sampling by using a Walsh Hadamard matrix to obtain a measured value; 3, performing image reconstruction and meanwhile restoring a background and a target; 4, performing binarization processing on the infrared small target image and detecting the infrared small target. By adopting the method, detecting the infrared small target in a compression domain is realized, data processing capacity and storage capacity are reduced by compressed sampling, the separation of the target from the background is realized after reconstruction, both the target and the background are obtained, the obtained target part has very high gain of signal to noise ratio, the background and noise are effectively restrained, and the infrared small target can be detected only by simple binarization processing in subsequent processing.