As the surface damage detection plays an important role in evaluating engineering ceramic surface quality, this paper introduces an image reconstruction algorithm, Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm, into the damage detection of engineering ceramics grounding surface for the first time. It analyzes the theoretical function of the algorithm and gives a detection example. First, the input image data set was reduced from an original data space to a lower-dimensional NMF space, and the image reconstruction relative error 0.1 rule proposed by this paper was used to determine a proper space basis r value. Then, the background image of ground texture was obtained by image reconstruction using two lower-dimensional nonnegative matrixes, and the ground textures were removed by image subtraction. Finally, the Canny edge detection was used to extract the damage image of engineering ceramics grounding surface. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can accurately extract the surface damage of engineering ceramics and can calculate the evaluation parameter of grinding damage rate.