As a load-bearing component, steel wire rope has been used in many industrial production activities. The quantitative assessment of wire rope damage can not only ensure production safety, but also save certain resources and reduce production costs. In this study, based on the metal magnetic memory effect, a weak magnetic field was applied to the specimen, and ANSYS software was used to perform finite element analysis on the simulation model. The strong correlation between the characteristic parameters of the wire rope damage signal and the cross Section loss rate (CLR) was verified. In the experiment, the self-made steel wire rope detection device was used to detect the sample, after solving the Spearman correlation coefficient for the characteristic parameters of the collected signal, an independence weight analysis is performed. A quantitative fitting equation for cross Section damage is established, the determination coefficient $R<^>{2}$ = 0.9074.