Electromagnetic methods are commonly employed to detect wire rope discontinuities. However, determining the residual strength of wire rope based on the quantitative recognition of discontinuities remains problematic. We have designed a prototype device based on the residual magnetic field (RMF) of ferromagnetic materials, which overcomes the disadvantages associated with in-service inspections, such as large volume, inconvenient operation, low precision, and poor portability by providing a relatively small and lightweight device with improved detection precision. A novel filtering system consisting of the Hilbert-Huang transform and compressed sensing wavelet filtering is presented. Digital image processing was applied to achieve the localization and segmentation of defect RMF images. The statistical texture and invariant moment characteristics of the defect images were extracted as the input of a radial basis function neural network. Experimental results show that the RMF device can detect defects in various types of wire rope and prolong the service life of test equipment by reducing the friction between the detection device and the wire rope by accommodating a high lift-off distance.