The vehicle theodolite has been the trend of the optical shooting range survey. While tracking and imaging of the long-distance dim targets have not been solved perfectly in this field, so this paper presents one active polarization imaging technology to find a way to deal with it. Firstly, we put forward a new active polarization imaging system with the lighting mode of circularly polarized laser and receives the reflected light by the mode of range-gating technique; secondly, deduces the pulse laser beam pointing algorithm; thirdly, describes the extended Kalman filtering algorithm to compensate the delay in the process and the calculation of the polarization angle, the attitude angle of flight target using single station cosine method and the depolarization of the circularly polarized laser. Finally, the result of this active polarization imaging technology which is simulated and analyzed in Simulink shows that the pointing precision can reach 0.0075 degrees. Then the analysis in this paper provide a theoretical basis for the application of the active polarization imaging technology in the field of the optical shooting range survey. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.