A CCD imaging system in the absorbent aerosol detector is designed, whose hardware includes timing driving circuit, pre-processing and analog-front-end circuit, power management circuit, FPGA main control unit, Camera Link communication circuit, and so on. A kind of driving timing with reverse transfer is introduced to effectively eliminate the residual charge in the frame transfer process and improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The performance of this CCD imaging system is tested. The experimental results show that as for this imaging system, the 14 bit image data can output steadily with a frame frequency of 1.8 frame/s, the shortest exposure time of 17.28 ms and a nonlinearity error of 1.68%. Under the condition of 80% saturation exposure, the imaging signal-to-noise ratio is 54.36 dB, and the dynamic range of CCD detectable signals is 61.55 dB. The operational requirements of this detector such as stable output, high time resolution, excellent linear performance, high signal-to-noise ratio, and large dynamic range of signals are satisfied.