The corrugated compensator is a key component for compensation in modern pipelines. The corrugated compensator is a compensation device that absorbs the dimensional changes in pipelines due to thermal expansion and contraction, excessive pressure, etc. through the effective expansion and contraction of its own elastic element, and detects the fault conditions caused by excessive axial dimensional changes of corrugated compensators in industrial pipelines in real time. In this paper, an improved edge detection operator based on machine vision technology is designed to detect the axial dimension of the corrugated compensator, using hybrid filtering instead of Gaussian filtering to filter the noise, refining the image by morphological processing, and finally using the OTSU algorithm to achieve the separation of the object to be measured and the background. The experiment proves that the machine vision technology can detect the axial dimension of the corrugated compensator, and the method can solve the problem that the axial dimension of the corrugated compensator in industrial pipelines is difficult to detect in real time, while the detection equipment is easy to install, safe to use, and the accuracy can reach the expected index.