Abstract: Driven by the requirements of the coastal zone imager (CZI) to achieve high-resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio (SRN), large dynamic range, wide-swath and multi-spectral detection within the coastal zone regions, and constraints of small volume and light mass of the CZI on the new generation ocean color observation satellite, the design and verification of the CZI were carried out. Firstly, a large-range, high-precision pointing mechanism was designed. An oscillating mirror assembly was employed to expand the field of view (FOV) and acquire coastal observation images over a wide-swath. An FOV reuse imaging design method with controllable transmittance and reflectance ratios was proposed to realize a light and small opto-mechanical main structure. Secondly, a multi-spectral band interlaced layout was designed to improve the registration accuracy of detecting nine spectral bands in the coastal zone. Thirdly, an "outer-plus-inner" nested two-stage stray light suppression scheme was proposed to effectively suppress the propagation path of stray light, achieving a low stray light performance better than 2% within a large FOV, thereby enhancing coastal imaging quality. Finally, tests including ground validation, visual axis pointing precision, stray light suppression, and on-orbit imaging performance were conducted, completing the on-orbit imaging quality evaluation. Test results indicate that the light, small, wide-swath, and multi-spectral new generation CZI can perform high-precision pointing detection of the coastal zone within a 1 029 km wide-swath, and achieve panchromatic resolution better than 5 m and multi-spectral resolution better than 20 m, realizing nine-band high SNR ratio and large dynamic range imaging, and significantly improving the efficiency of information acquisition within the global land-ocean interface zone.