An effective damage test method based on a marker-based watershed algorithm with gray control(MWGC) is proposed to study the properties of damage induced by near-field laser irradiation for large-aperture laser facilities.Damage tests were performed on fused silica samples and information on the size of damage sites was obtained by this new algorithm,which can effectively suppress the issue of over-segmentation of images resulting from non-uniform illumination in darkfield imaging.Experimental analysis and results show that the lateral damage growth on the exit surface is exponential,and the number of damage sites decreases sharply with damage site size in the damage site distribution statistics.The average damage growth coefficients fitted according to the experimental results for Corning-7980 and Heraeus-Suprasil312 samples at 351 nm are 1.10 ± 0.31 and 0.60 ± 0.09,respectively. An effective damage test method based on a marker-based watershed algorithm with gray control (MWGC) is proposed to study the properties of damage induced by near-field laser irradiation for large-aperture laser facilities. Damage tests were performed on fused silica samples and information on the size of damage sites was obtained by this new algorithm, which can effectively suppress the issue of over-segmentation of images resulting from non-uniform illumination in darkfield imaging. Experimental analysis and results show that the lateral damage growth on the exit surface is exponential, and the number of damage sites reduces sharply with damage site size in the damage site distribution statistics. The average damage growth coefficient fitted according to the experimental results for Corning-7980 and Heraeus-Suprasil 312 samples at 351 nm are 1.10 ± 0.31 and 0.60 ± 0.09, respectively.