Taking into account the effect of remote sensing images blurred by the atmospheric, the effect of atmospheric modulation transfer function (MTF) is removed by correcting the adjacent effects in atmospheric correction on the basis of traditional knife- edge method, and the MTF is calculated on a real surface reflectance images. The result which objectively reflects the MTF of the sensor is better than conventional methods and is closer to the laboratory measurements. In addition, the effects of the aerosol optical thickness on the MTF measurement through the simulation experiments are analyzed, the experimental results show that the proposed method is more suitable for on-orbit MTF measurement than the traditional knife-edge method, and more objectively reflect the real imaging sensor.