The embodiment of the invention discloses a fault detection method and fault detection apparatus used for a shafting device, relating to the automatic control technical field, and can detect and discriminate minimal fault forms, and increase fault prediction accuracy. The method comprises: obtaining operation signals of a shafting device in a ship when the ship sails smoothly, the operation signals comprising displacement, speed and acceleration signals of the bearing, axle tube and coupler in the shafting device in vertical and horizontal directions; performing frequency domain main energy extraction on the operation signals, generating reconstructed signals, performing continuous wavelet decomposition on the reconstructed signals, and generating a wavelet grey-scale map based on the result of continuous wavelet decomposition; performing feature extraction on the wavelet grey-scale map, removing redundancy feature vectors with relevance, and generating a fault characteristic vector set according to kept characteristic vectors; and determining whether the shafting device has faults in dependence on the fault characteristic vector set. The fault detection method and fault detection apparatus are suitable for shafting device fault detection.