The invention discloses a contour line model-based saddle point extraction method, which comprises the following steps of: 1, acquiring contour line data and carrying out line-to-surface processing toobtain a surface set S; 2, finding the outermost equal-height surface s from the S; 3, traversing the set S, finding out all faces which are located in an area surrounded by the faces s and are adjacent to the faces s, and forming an internal adjacent face set T; wherein the internal adjacent surfaces with the elevation values greater than the elevation values of the surfaces s in the set T forma set W; 4, extracting saddle points between every two internal adjacent surfaces in the set W to form a set U; Adding a saddle point which is not located in any internal adjacent surface in the set Uinto the set Us; 5, deleting the surface s from the surface set S, and repeating the steps 2-5; and 4, the number of the internal adjacent surfaces in the current outermost contour surface is smallerthan 2. According to the method, the topographic characteristics of the saddle points and the spatial characteristics of the saddle points in the contour line are fully utilized, the problem that pseudo saddle points are generated in the traditional saddle point extraction process is solved, and the extraction precision of the saddle points is improved.