In the real environment of industrial equipment, the vibration signals of essential components show deviations due to the fault and noise. Notably, the noise in the signal will interfere with the diagnosis process of the signal and reduce the accuracy of fault diagnosis. Based on the above problem, adaptive filtering (AF) is used as an excellent method to attenuate noise without specifying the noise type. However, how to define the most appropriate length and type of morphological filter element is the most inherent problem which needs to be solved first. This paper proposed a cooperative diagnosis method of rolling bearings vibration signal based on improved adaptive filtering and joint distribution adaptation (JDA). First, the kurtosis under different element types and lengths is calculated as an index. The structural element corresponding to maximum kurtosis is selected as the most suitable morphological filter element because the different morphological filter elements reflect the effect of feature extraction. Then, JDA aims to improve both the marginal distribution and the conditional distribution to solve the chaotic distribution of time-domain features under variable working conditions. Finally, the improved least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) verified the effectiveness and improvement of the proposed method under bearing acceleration signal. At the same time, the comparative experiment proved that the proposed method not only directly corrects the most appropriate elements greatly optimizes the feature structure, but also enhances the accuracy of fault diagnosis. INDEX TERMS adaptive filters, morphological operation, time domain features, transfer learning, joint distribution adaptation, LSSVM, fault diagnosis.