In view of the high cost and low effectiveness of current detection methods for some elliptic hole group workpieces,an elliptic hole group detection method based on maximal inscribed circle was proposed. Firstly, the image was preprocessed by denoising, binaryzation and edge detection. According to the geometric properties of ellipse, the ellipse's maximal inscribed circle was calculated by using the ellipse center estimation method and the distance selection method. Then, the center coordinates of the ellipse, the length of long and short axes and the inclination angle were determined. The experimental results show that the proposed method can quickly and accurately detect the elliptic hole group, and can quickly intercept effective ellipse arc based on the estimation of the center of the ellipse, then the invalid samples are reduced; compared with the Hough ellipse detection algorithm based on center estimation and the ellipse detection algorithm based on the improved least square method, it has the advantages of high precision, short time consumption, and can be effectively applied to automatic detection of elliptical hole group workpieces.