The image preprocessing is an important part in the field of digital image processing, and it’s also the premise for the image detection of cold steel strip surface defects. The factors including the complicated on-site environment and the distortion of the optical system will cause image degradation, which will directly affects the feature extraction and classification of the images. Aiming at these problems, a method combining the adaptive median filter and homomorphic filter is proposed to preprocess the image. The adaptive median filter is effective for image denoising, and the Gaussian homomorphic filter can steadily remove the nonuniform illumination of images. Finally, the original and preprocessed images and their features are analyzed and compared. The results show that this method can improve the image quality effectively.