For the profile-distortion of Si3N4 bearing rolling elements microcracks image. A coupling method of variable-scale truncated median filtering and detection-driven active contour model is proposed. Details are as follows. The sigmoid activation function is constructed to dynamically adjust the circular window. The local threshold truncation is designed to adapt to the characteristics of different regions in the image. The area threshold is defined to eliminate non-target features. The mean peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of filtered images is about 40.263. The edge overlap rate is as low as 0.1027. The mean accuracy of feature extraction is about 94.33 %. To sum up, the influence result from profile-distortion on the accuracy of feature extraction of Si3N4 bearing rolling elements microcracks is effectively solved.