Aiming at the three-dimensional defects detection of high-voltage cables joint, a method based on iterative residual fitting is proposed. The three-dimensional point cloud data was obtained by reconstructing the laser line projected onto the surface of the high-voltage cable joint. In order to remove noise generated by reconstruction which is located above or below the curve, a simple and effective strategy that the noise can be filtered by the gradient change in the neighborhood is adopted. Then a continuous iterative residual fitting method is proposed to effectively reduce the interference of the defect area on the curve fitting accuracy, thereby obtaining the accurate equation expression of the cable surface curve. By comparing the residual value of the high-voltage cable surface points relative to the fitting curve, the points of the defect area are marked. Finally three-dimensional defect area is extracted through segmentation and clustering. Experiments have verified the effectiveness of this method. Compared with the cylindrical fitting method, it can be seen that both the center deviation and the deviation in the length, width and height of extracted defects are better than the cylindrical fitting method. The recognition rate of concave and convex defects of the proposed method are 96.29% and 93.20% respectively .