The 3D point cloud data obtained from the laser line structured light scanner has redundancy,and a point cloud simplification algorithm based on the two order non-uniform partition is designed and implemented to deal with locomotive running department in this paper. First, according to the intrinsic shape signature (ISS), the point cloud normal vector of the detected object are estimated and the feature points of the point cloud are extracted. Then, according to the distribution of the feature point cloud, the point cloud is first divided non-uniformly to obtain uneven initial cloud patches. Finally, the divided cloud points are mapped to different Gaussian spheres for further subdivi-sion. The mean shift clustering is performed on the Gauss sphere to extract the center of gravity of each cluster in the actual three-dimensional space. The set of the center of gravity is the result of simplification. Experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. It can keep the details information of the point cloud while en-suring a high simplification rate. Comparing with the existing method, this method balances the speed and accuracy, and is more suitable for the on-line locomotive automated detection system.