In order to solve the fault line selection and location problems of the small-current grounding fault in distribution network, the adaptive filtering property for EMD is formulated firstly, and then in view of the different characteristics are showed by the IMF obtained by EMD under different fault Angles , the direction of fault point mutation in low-frequency and the capacitance transient energy are chosen as fault line selection criteria when the low-frequency components occupy different proportion .The fault location can be finally determined based upon the interaction between DTU and FPI with the adjacent FPI’s waveform comparison. Moreover, the logic nodes, which regard to fault line selection and location are newly expanded according to IEC61850, which also provides reference to the way to realize the DTU or FPI’s function and monitoring. The effectiveness of the proposed fault line selection and location methods are verified by the simulation results of the small-current grounding fault in distribution network built in matlab/simulink.