Aiming at the defects of the Gaussian filter and Wavelet filter, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform was applied in the 3 D surface topography evaluation. 3 D surface topography was divided into different scales subbands, and the subbands belonging to roughness, waviness and shape components were determined by the filter cut-off wavelength, and then the different components were generated by nonsubsampled contourlet inverse transform. At last, a actual measurement of 3 D surface topography were analyzed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.