The compound eye imaging system, with such advantages as large field of view (FOV), small size, and light weight, has been extensively studied at home and abroad in recent years, and is one of the future development directions of optical imaging technology. Due to the smaller diameter of the sub-aperture, the existing compound eye system with large FOV is difficult to obtain high resolution images, and therefore cannot meet the requirements in such fields as remote sensing and aerial reconnaissance. To solve these problems, a dual-mode compound eye imaging system is proposed in this paper. This system not only has the imaging capability of multi-aperture and wide FOV as in the conventional compound eye, but also can enhance the imaging resolution significantly while all sub-apertures point at identical direction and the captured sub-images are processed by high resolution reconstruction. The principle and implement method of the system are analyzed. The feasibility of dual-mode imaging is verified by constructing an experimental device, which provides an innovative idea for the development of compound eye imaging system.