Because the extract of the weak failure information is always the difficulty and focus of fault detection. Aiming for specific statistical properties of complex wavelet coefficients of gearbox vibration signals, a new signal-denoising method which uses local adaptive algorithm based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) is introduced to extract weak failure information in gear, especially to extract impulse components. By taking into account the non-Gaussian probability distribution and the statistical dependencies among wavelet coefficients of some signals, and by taking the advantage of near shift-invariance of DT-CWT, the higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than common wavelet denoising methods can be obtained. Experiments of extracting periodic impulses in gearbox vibration signals indicate that the method can extract incipient fault feature and hidden information from heavy noise, and it has an excellent effect on identifying weak feature signals in gearbox vibration signals.