Abstract: Infrared radiation can reflect the damage of coal and rock under load, and can be used to monitor and prevent the dynamic disaster of coal and rock. But the infrared thermal image generated by the infrared thermal imager has low pixel resolution and large noise, which leads to the detection result being greatly affected by subjective factors. Therefore, the damaged area of the coal body cannot be accurately identified. It has become a trend to combine deep learning with infrared thermal imaging for nondestructive testing. But the research on the identification and detection of coal damage under load by combining deep learning and infrared thermal imaging is relatively few. In order to solve the above problems, a segmentation method of the abnormal area of coal infrared thermal image based on multi-scale channel attention module (MS-CAM) U-Net model is proposed. The MS-CAM is introduced into the encoder of the traditional U-Net model, and the U-Net model structure based on MS-CAM is designed. The model not only pays attention to the major characteristics of the coal infrared thermal image abnormal area, but also pays attention to the small target characteristics of the abnormal area, so as to improve the segmentation accuracy of the abnormal area. In order to reduce the influence of the lack of coal infrared thermal image data set on the accuracy and applicability of the model, the data enhancement operation is carried out on the created coal infrared thermal image data set. The MS-CAM-based U-Net model is pre-trained by using the MS COCO data set. Then the coal infrared thermal image data set is used for training to obtain the final network weight. The experimental result shows that the method can effectively segment the abnormal areas of the infrared thermal image of the coal body. The accuracy rate, the F1 score, the Dice coefficient and the average cross-combination ratio are 94.75%, 94.94%, 94.65%, and 90. 03% respectively. The results are superior to the Deeplab model, the U-Net model and the U-Net model based on the attention mechanism of the SENet.