In order to solve the shortcomings as halo and detail blur in the current infrared image enhancement methods, an infrared image enhancement algorithm using exponential homomorphic filter coupled with detail sharpening rule is proposed in this paper. Based on the homomorphic filtering method, an exponential homomorphic function is constructed by the distance between the pixel and the center pixel in the frequency domain to form an exponential homomorphic filter, which is used to denoise the image and enhance the contrast of the image. Based on the phase congruence method and the adaptive high lifting filtering method, detail sharpening rules are constructed. In the rule of detail sharpening, the phase consistency method is used to extract the detail features of the image accurately through Fourier transform. Then, the high lifting filtering method is introduced, which uses the mean value of the image to construct an adaptive sharpening factor to form an adaptive high lifting filtering method. The extracted image details are sharpened to enhance the details of the image. The experimental results show that the image enhanced by the proposed method has better contrast than the current infrared image enhancement algorithm, and the edge of the image is clearer, which shows that the proposed method has better enhancement effect.