In order to improve the applicability of overall performance of thermal imager and reduce the uncertainty introduced by human observation,TOD test method and its machine vision implementation were studied.As for the limitation of MRTD method for overall performance of staring array thermal imager,the adaptability of TOD method was analyzed under dynamic scene,dynamic non-uniformity correction and so on.By using human visual transfer function and psychological model to replace subjective observing procedure,using blur function and down sampling to simulate the signal transfer procedure,using geometric template matching to replace human perceptive processes,the objective measurement of TOD method was achieved.The measurement uncertainty of overall performance for staring array imager using TOD can be improved from ± 20% to 8%,which can be improved further by using the geometric template matching in machine interpretation procedure.The applicability and consistency of the overall performance of thermal imager can be improved effectively with the TOD method and its machine vision implementation.