Abstract: Soil surface roughness is an important indicator to descript soil surface micro-topography,which is one of the re-search hotspots in the field of microwave remote sensing. In this paper,a simple and effective method for measuring soil roughness, the probe profile method,was proposed by using the self-made surface roughness plate and digital camera based on the image process-ing. The surface roughness plate was photographed,then the images are processed to obtain the actual height of each probe,and the root mean square height and the correlation length of the soil surface roughness was calculated. Finally,a comparative experiment was carried out to verify the effectiveness of the method.