Bilateral filter (BF), functioning by two Gaussian filters, domain and range filter is a nonlinear filter for sharpness enhancement and noise removal. In infrared (IR) small target detection field, the BF is designed by background predictor for predicting background not including small target. For this, the standard deviations of the two Gaussian filters need to be changed adaptively in background and target region of an infrared image. In this paper, the proposed bilateral filter make the standard deviations changed adaptively, using variance feature of mean values of surrounding block neighboring local filter window. And, in case the variance of mean values for surrounding blocks is low for any processed pixel, the pixel is classified to flat background and target region for enhancing background prediction. On the other hand, any pixel with high variance for surrounding blocks is classified to edge region. Small target can be detected by subtracting predicted background from original image. In experimental results, we confirmed that the proposed bilateral filter has superior target detection rate, compared with existing methods.