As general components in machinery, rolling bearings are also fault prone components. And unexpected faults will bring immeasurable loss to economy, personnel, etc. Therefore, fault detection and diagnosis are of paramount importance. As the carrier of fault information, component response signal is the most concerned part in fault diagnosis researches. The detection methods for response signal can be divided into contact and non-contact detection. Compared with the contact detection, laser Doppler vibrometer has the advantage of no contact, no damage and dynamic measurement. Thus, this paper progresses theoretical and experimental researches on non-contact detection of bearing wear fault based on laser Doppler vibrometer. Firstly, the vibration measurement principle of laser Doppler vibrometer is analyzed in this paper. On account of the principle, the internal optical path and signal flow of the single point laser vibrometer is established and analyzed. Secondly, in order to carry out the non-contact detection test, an optical measuring system based on a single point laser vibrometer is built to collect signals. Also, a bearing wear fault simulated test rig is built to provide fault response signals. Based on the above built test devices, the detection tests of the intact and faulty bearings are carried out. Lastly, through the analysis of collected signals of bearings with wear of different parts in time domain and frequency domain, the characterizations of the corresponding fault are obtained so as to implement the fault diagnosis, which prove the effectiveness of laser vibration detection method for fault detection.