In the application of rotating machinery, rolling bearing is the key precision equipment to reduce the friction loss between shaft and shaft seat. In order to effectively monitor the damage of rolling bearing caused by wear, corrosion and overload, the characterization of rolling bearing vibration signal for rolling bearing fault is designed and verified. This experimental design method is to start from the vibration signal of the rolling bearing collected during the mechanical rotation process, and to extract and analyze the fault characteristics of the rolling bearing in Matlab. Through empirical mode decomposition to obtain the inherent modal function of the vibration signal, the envelope spectrum of each component is obtained after the Hilbert-Huang transformation, and the fault characteristic value calculated by the theory is compared and matched to achieve the rolling bearing fault diagnosis and analysis. The experimental results show that the theoretical calculation of the outer ring fault frequency of rolling bearing is about 49 Hz, and the experimental measurement of the fault frequency is 50 Hz, which is consistent with the outer ring fault frequency characteristics. Therefore, this method can accurately characterize the fault frequency of rolling bearing, and can realize the effective monitoring of rolling bearing fault.