Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) infrared detection has problems such as weak and small targets, complex backgrounds, and poor real-time detection performance. It is difficult for general target detection algorithms to achieve the requirements of a high detection rate, low missed detection rate, and high real-time performance. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an improved small target detection method based on Picodet. First, to address the problem of poor real-time performance, an improved lightweight LCNet network was introduced as the backbone network for feature extraction. Secondly, in order to solve the problems of high false detection rate and missed detection rate due to weak targets, the Squeeze-and-Excitation module was added and the feature pyramid structure was improved. Experimental results obtained on the HIT-UAV public dataset show that the improved detection model's real-time frame rate increased by 31 fps and the average accuracy (MAP) increased by 7%, which proves the effectiveness of this method for UAV infrared small target detection.