The invention provides a monocular infrared video three-dimensional reconstruction method based on a visual odometer. Firstly, a thermal infrared imager is calibrated; then, a direct method and sparse method visual odometer model is constructed; then, frames are managed, a key frame is generated from a continuous infrared image sequence to be processed, and the key frame is marginalized; point management is conducted on the pixel on the key frame; finally, sliding window optimization is conducted on the key frame, a photometric error of the direct method and sparse method visual odometer model is minimized, the reverse depths of thermal infrared imager pose, internal references and spatial points are solved in an iterative algorithm by a gauss-newton method, and finally, three-dimensional point cloud of a scene is obtained. According to the monocular infrared video three-dimensional reconstruction method based on the visual odometer, the direct method is applied to photometric error minimization, traditional feature point detection and matching are skipped, through direction operation on a grey value of the pixel, all variables which the photometric error to be optimized depend on is calculated directly, and therefore three-dimensional reconstruction of a night vision scene is achieved, the real-time capability of the three-dimensional reconstruction is ensured, and the spaciousness of the scene is enhanced.