In order to extract fault impulse feature of large-scale rotating machinery from strong background noise, a sparse feature extraction method based on sparse decomposition combined multiresolution generalized S transform is proposed in this paper. In this method, multiresolution generalized S transform is employed to find the optimal atom for every iteration, which firstly takes in to account the generalized S transform with discretized adjustment factors, then builds an atom corresponding to the maximum energy. The multiresolution generalized S transform has better accuracy compared to generalized S transform and faster searching speed compared to the orthogonal matching pursuit method in selecting the optimal atom. Then, the orthogonal matching pursuit method is used to decompose the signal into several optimal atoms. The proposed method is applied to analyze the simulated signal and vibration signals collected from experimental failure rolling bearings. The results prove that the proposed method has better performances such as high precision and fast decomposition speed than the traditional orthogonal matching pursuit method method and local mean decomposition method.