In this paper,a method is proposed to detect defects in 45 steel by using resistance tomography. When detecting 45 steel defects,because of its low resistance and high conductivity,the detected signal is relatively weak and easy to be interfered with by noise,and it is difficult to obtain features conducive to image reconstruction from the detected signal. Therefore,by constructing a resistance tomography device specifically for 45 steel detection,a large signal intensity data can be obtained,and the data processing can be carried out by wavelet analysis,the noise types can be separated,and the effective single-frequency characteristic signal can be extracted,so as to effectively improve the quality of image reconstruction. Five algorithms were used to image the defects,and the results showed that the total variation reconstruction al-gorithm could effectively identify the location and size of defects in a variety of situations.