Due to the poor contrast and uneven gray scales of infrared measurement images,the pseudo-color images generated by traditional hot metal coding which employs fixed interval mapping are often unable to reflect the practical temperature.In order to solve the problem,this paper makes improvement to the traditional hot metal coding according to the gray scale distribution,realizes adaptive selecting of gray scale intervals by means of Otsu method and proposes an adaptive hot metal code pseudo-color coding method for infrared measurement images.The experiment results show that the proposed method is fairly adaptive and the pseudo-color images generating by it can truly reflect the temperature gradations.