To accurately extract the bearing fault-induced impulse features from the vibration signals corrupted by heavy noise and large-amplitude random impulses, an adaptive multi-band denoising model based on the Morlet wavelet filter and sparse representation is put forward. First, to locate the desired frequency band associated with fault components, the Morlet wavelet filter is employed to band-pass the signal from the perspective of the frequency-domain. Herein, an improved Protrugram-based index, termed as windowed envelope spectral kurtosis, is designed as the objective function to choose the optimal center frequency and the bandwidth of the Morlet wavelet filter. Furthermore, benefitting from the time-domain characteristics of the vibration signal, the in-band noise is eliminated by sparse representation. One of the critical parameters (resonance frequency) of the wavelet atom used in the sparse representation dictionary is directly taken as the center frequency of the Morlet wavelet filter, which makes full use of the information derived from the filter, and thus significantly improves the calculation efficiency. Finally, the recovery signal is demodulated by the Hilbert transform to extract the fault characteristic frequency. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are demonstrated through a complete analysis of the simulated, experimental, and engineering signals, as well as a comparison with such prevalent methods as Kurtogram, individual sparse representation, and Morlet wavelet filter combined with the maximum correlation kurtosis deconvolution.