Localized faults in rolling bearing tend to result in periodic shocks and thus arouse periodic responses in the vibration signal. In this paper, a novel fault diagnosis method based on maximal spectral kurtosis tunable Q-factor wavelet transformation (TQWT) and group sparsity total variation denoising (GS-TVD) is proposed to address the issue of bearing incipient failure. Firstly, the range of Q-factor was pre-selected according to the spectral distribution of impulse component, and bearing vibration signal was transformed by the TQWT method. Then, the spectral kurtosis of each scale transform coefficients was calculated, and the optimal Q-factor and decomposition scale can be selected according to the kurtosis maximum principle. In order to remove the interference components and high-frequency noise from the reconstructed vibration signal generated by inverse TQWT, the GS-TVD approach is employed, thus the cyclic periodicity characteristic and transient impulses can be detected obviously. The two cases experimental results indicate that the proposed technique is more effective and applicable for bearing incipient fault diagnosis compared with traditional method.