Incipient fault for a gearbox diagnosis is difficult because the signals with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are corrupted with background noise. A method based on chaos theory and sampling integral technology will be presented to detect the incipient fault of gearbox according to the characters of the gearbox vibration signals. Sampling integral technology was used to improve the tracking ability of fault signals with lower SNR. The small changes in the sidebands of meshing frequency can be detected by the transformation of chaotic phase diagram and its Hu moment invariants, and on this basis the incipient faults can be diagnosed. The results based on gearboxes experiment justify the effectiveness of the method.