The invention provides a dam surface crack skeleton extraction method, and belongs to the field of image processing. According to the technical scheme, the dam surface crack skeleton extraction methodis characterized by comprising the steps of using an industrial camera for conducting image collection on dam cracks; performing spot detection on the acquired image; using a Kalman filtering tracking algorithm to mark the positions of spots in the image; removing marked spots by using a mathematical morphology method to obtain a dam crack image with the spots removed; and performing skeleton extraction operation based on a genetic algorithm on the dam crack image with the spots removed. The method has the beneficial effects that influence of dam spots on actual cracks in the actual environment is effectively removed, dam surface crack skeleton extraction accuracy is improved, and dam surface crack skeleton extraction is effectively completed.