Abstract: Crop residue, as an important element of Agro-ecosystem, can influence the flow of nutrients, carbon, water, and energy in Agro-ecosystem. To provide technical support for crop residue cover estimation with remote sensing data, relationships between winter wheat residue cover and reflectance of HJ-1B and three normalized difference indices were analyzed and discussed. Normalized difference index of HJ-1B IRS was selected to establish winter wheat residue cover estimation model. The model was validated using independent field observation data. Among all the 11 validation sites, the maximum relative error was 24.96% and the average relative error was 9.28%. Validation results indicated that an acceptable accuracy was achieved in winter wheat residue cover estimation.