In view of the intuitive characteristics of atmospheric visibility and the urgent need of infrared photoelectric technology, a calculation and measurement method of atmospheric infrared visibility is proposed, and an atmospheric infrared visibility measuring instrument is developed. The instrument uses 1064 nm wavelength laser as the light source and Xenics camera as detector to measure infrared visibility. A traditional background subtraction method and the shift-phase subtraction are used to carry out the contrast experiment when dark background processing is carried out. The measurement results are also processed by the slope and Klett integration method in the process of visibility inversion. Results show that the infraredvisibility measured by the system is basically the same as that of the Belfort visibility meter, and the correlation coefficient is more than 80%, which shows that the calculation and measurement results of infrared visibility are reliable.