By detecting the laser backscattering characteristics of the ship's wake which are different from the environment, the ship's course, speed, tonnage and other key information can be counter-performed, which has a high military value. In this paper, a set of ship wake imaging detection system is constructed on top of the laser active illumination detection mode combining an industrial camera and a high-frequency laser, which achieves the effective detection of ship wake bubbles with a large field of view and a large dynamic range. Monte Carlo method is used to construct the simulation platform of ship wake imaging detection, and the feasibility of this method is verified. In addition, a prototype of ship wake image detection system based on laser active illumination is built, and a large number of experiments are carried out under the conditions of indoor laboratory pool to verify the system performance, and the influence of different system parameters on the detection performance is analyzed. At the same time, the evaluation of detection performance under visible light interference is carried out, which verifies that the system has strong anti-visible light interference ability, and provides theoretical support for the practice of laser active illumination imaging detection mode in ship wake detection.