In order to detect the boundary of wire rope exactly in visual inspection of surface defection, a novel texture segmentation and boundary recognition method is proposed. The fuzzy Hough transform is used to detect the direction of rope texture. A new texture feature is proposed based on the Edge Direction Density Histogram (EDDH). The EDDH is weighted based on the direction of rope texture in Fuzzy C-Means clustering segmentation. The boundary of wire rope is recognized preliminary to detect parallel lines in the map of membership by Hough transform. Moreover, an adaptive boundary correction method is presented to confirm the boundary exactly. The results of texture segmentation and boundary recognition by the proposed method are compared with the results of Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed method can realize wire rope image segmentation and boundary recognition effectively, and its performance is better than the GLCM′s and LBP’s.