Cooled infrared detector is widely used as the core part in a variety of the thermal imaging systems. For the selection of the highly reliable cooled infrared detector with good performance, it is necessary for us to possess the characterization methods of the well defined performance index of cooled infrared detector. In this paper, various performance index of the cooled infrared detector including reliability as well as the optical and cooling performance of cooled infrared detector are defined and their characterization methods will be investigated and implemented systematically.