Due to the working environment, steel wire ropes are prone to a variety of defects such as broken wires. However, the defect signals are mixed with strand signals during the detection, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio of the detection signals. Although current studies have designed some signal processing methods to weaken strand signals, these methods struggle to yield high signal-to-noise ratio detection signals when the defects are minor and the strand signals exhibit weak periodicity. What’s more, when conducting reciprocating scans on the steel wire rope with short scanning distances, the detection signals are short and include pause signals. In this situation, using single conventional methods are also difficult to obtain high signal-to-noise ratio signals. Therefore, this paper proposes a new strand signal processing method based on Hilbert transform and filtering techniques. Firstly, the principle and processing steps of the proposed method are introduced. Then, experiments and case studies regarding different defects are carried out to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with other conventional methods to demonstrate its superiority. Finally, the advantages and limitations of the proposed method are discussed.