The infrared photodetector can obtain IR radiation either reflected by or radiated from the target, which is a unique property and makes infrared photodetectors play an important role in areas such as national defense, communications, remote sensing, and aerospace along with other advantages, such as strong anti-interference, full-time detection, long detection range, and high-resolution imaging. The infrared photodetector is undergoing radical development from the application of the first generation multielement detectors in the 1940s to the striving for the proposal of SWaP³ concepts in the third generation in the late 1990s. Traditional infrared photodetectors, of which the advancement focus on improving performance indicators such as array size, sensitivity, and resolution, using light intensity information for imaging, are sluggish to meet future demanding such as recognizing diverse targets, facing environmental complexity, and dealing with multiform tasks at the same time. Infrared photodetectors for multidimensional optical information acquisition provide new routes to improve the device performance and meet future needs. Infrared photodetector obtains not only abundant intrinsic information of light besides intensity, such as phase, wavelength, polarization, and momentum, but also external information like optical path. This paper focuses on the multi-dimension infrared detection extracting information of wavelength, polarization, phase, and the optical path of the targets, which does not only summarize the research progress of infrared photodetectors from the aspects of new principles, new materials, and new structures, but also put forward the idea and outlook for the development direction of the multi-dimensional infrared photodetectors.