Aiming at the shortcomings of infrared image recognition in intelligent substation, an improved target extraction scheme is proposed. Firstly, the Retinex theory is used to remove the influence of the lighting factor and improve the image brightness effect, and then the improved histogram equalization method based on grayscale transformation of segments is used to improve the image contrast. The region of the device is extracted by the region segmentation algorithm combined with the connected component extraction and the regional growth. The experimental results show that the scheme overcomes the drawbacks of existing methods and has good segmentation effect compared with the traditional method. It is a practical target extraction method for substation equipment.