This paper describes a method to set an intensity-based initial validation gate for tracking filter while preserves the ability of tracking a target with maximum speed. First, we collected real data set of signal versus distance of an airplane target. And at each data point, we computed maximum distance the target can move. And a function is modeled to expect the maximum moving pixels on the lateral direction based on the intensity of the detected target in IR image sequence. The initial prediction error covariance can be computed using this function to decide the size of the initial validation gate. The simulation results show the proposed method can set the appropriate initial validation gates to track the targets with the maximum speed.