In order to meet the needs of the prevention and control of pollutants emitted from ships in China, China issued the General Requirements for the Monitoring of Air Pollutant Emission from ships in 2021, and monitoring air pollutants from ships has become an urgent task. Currently, most ships in inland rivers in China use low-end diesel engines as the main power plant, and diesel engines will continue to be used as the main power plant for a long time in the future. The oil products used by ships usually have many impurities and poor quality. Coupled with the fact that most diesel engines are relatively old, they will continue to emit air pollutants such as sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides when sailing and entering and leaving the port, which cause serious harm to human health and atmospheric, ecological environment, so the monitoring and research of pollutants in ship exhaust are particularly important. In this paper, based on the imaging differential absorption spectroscopy technology, a ground-based fast imaging differential absorption spectroscopy systems is developed, which can detect the spatial distribution of pollutants. The time resolution of the system can reach seconds, and the field of view angle of the system is 6°×6°. The data inversion is based on the QDOAS software, and the solar scattering spectrum of the zenith at noon is selected as the reference spectrum to retrieve the inclined column concentration of the polluted gas in the observation area. According to the image information of the observation area captured by the camera in the system, the two-dimensional spatial distribution image of pollutants can be obtained by matching the pollutant concentration information with the spatial information. In order to verify the reliability of the system, a comparative verification experiment aimed at SO2 in the smoke plume of a power plant was carried out in Tongling in September 2022, and the results were compared with the results of the sweep ground-based imaging differential absorption spectrometer. The results show that the correlation of SO2 inclined column concentration is 0.935. In December 2022, the pollutant emission from ships along the Yangtze River was observed by using the ground-based fast imaging differential absorption spectroscopy system, and the continuous spatial two-dimensional distribution information of SO2 with a time resolution of 5 s was obtained. by matching with the image information obtained by the camera, the high concentration emissions can be traced back to specific ships. This study provides an effective real-time monitoring means for ships and other fast-moving pollution sources and provides reliable data support for treating ship emissions.