A kind of Subjective Imaging Effect Assessment (SIEA) method and its applications on intelligent imaging terminal design in engineering site are presented. First, some visual assessment indices are used to characterize the imaging effect: the image brightness, the image brightness uniformity, the color image contrast, the image edge blur, the image color difference, the image saturation, the image noise, and the integrated imaging effect index. A linear weighted function is employed to carry out the SIEA computation and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique is used to estimate its weights. Second, a SIEA software is developed. It can play images after the settings of assessment index or assessment reaction time, etc. Third, two cases are used to illustrate the application effects of proposed method: the image enhancement system design for surveillance camera and the imaging environment perception system design for intelligent lighting terminal. A Prior Sequential Stimulus (PSS) experiment is proposed to improve the evaluation stability of SIEA method. Many experiment results have shown the proposed method can realize a stable system design or parameters setting for the intelligent imaging terminal in engineering site.