Traditional methods of roughness characterization cannot properly reflect the differences between metal and engineering ceramics surfaces. Therefore, fractal method is introduced to characterize the engineering ceramics ground surface in this paper. This article compares various methods to calculate profile dimension. By comparison, the variation method is suitable for extracting fractal dimension of engineering ceramics ground surface. The precision of variation method is further improved by modifying the error. In view of engineering ceramics ground surface, we have analyzed the relationship between fractal dimension and traditional roughness parameters, surface texture, surface function and material property using modified variation method. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.