The magnetic flux leakage method is widely used for non-destructive testing in wire rope applications. A non-destructive testing device for wire rope based on remanence was designed to solve the problems of large volume, low accuracy, and complex operations seen in traditional devices. A wavelet denoising method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition was proposed to reduce the system noise in broken wire rope testing. After extracting the defects image, the wavelet super-resolution reconstruction technique was adopted to improve the resolution of defect grayscale. A back propagation neural network was designed to classify defects by the feature vectors of area, rectangle, stretch length, and seven invariant moments. The experimental results show that the device was not only highly precise and sensitive, but also easy to operate; noise is effectively suppressed by the proposed filtering algorithm, and broken wires are classified by the network.