Aiming at the problem of the time-consuming and labor-intensive manual inspection, a MV ( machine vision)-based cable conductor quality inspection method is proposed, which can inspect the cable conductor quality conveniently and efficiently. After analyzing the characteristics of the knife mark in the cross-section image of the cable, a method based on Gabor filter is proposed to eliminate this texture. According to the distribution rules of cable conductors, a hierarchical analysis algorithm based on clustering is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the effect of conductor contour detection, and implemented the layered inspection of conductor number, which can help inspectors quickly inspect the number of conductors and find the defects.