An improvement detecting method was proposed according to the disadvantages of testing method of optical axes parallelism of shipboard photoelectrical theodolite (short for theodolite) based on image processing. Pointolite replaced 0.2'' collimator to reduce the errors of crosshair images processing and improve the quality of image. What’s more, the high quality images could help to optimize the image processing method and the testing accuracy. The errors between the trial results interpreted by software and the results tested in dock were less than 10'', which indicated the improve method had some actual application values.