As the crucial part of a transmission assembly, the monitoring of the status of the crankshaft is essential for the normal working of a reciprocating machinery system. In consideration of the interaction between crankshaft system components, the fault vibration feature is typically non-stationary and nonlinear, and the single-scale feature extraction method cannot adequately assess the fault features, therefore a novel impact feature extraction method based on genetic algorithms to optimize multi-scale permutation entropy is proposed. Compared with other traditional feature extraction methods, the proposed method illustrates good robustness and high adaptability in the signal processing of crankshaft vibrations. Firstly, the improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) method is developed on the signal to obtain several intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, and the IMF components with a large kurtosis are selected for array reorganization. Then, the parameters of multi-scale permutation entropy (MPE) are optimized based on genetic algorithm (GA), the multi-scale permutation entropy is calculated and the feature vector set is constructed. The feature vector set is input into the support vector machine (SVM) and optimized by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) model for training and final pattern recognition, where the Variational Mode Decomposition(VMD)-GA-MPE with a PSO-SVM recognition model and the ICEEMDAN-MPE with PSO-SVM recognition model without GA optimization are constructed for a comparison with the proposed method. The research result illustrates that the proposed method, which inputs the genetic algorithm optimized multi-scale permutation entropy extracted from the ICEEMDAN decomposition into the PSO-SVM, performs well in impact feature extraction and the pattern recognition of crankshaft vibrations.