In power quality monitoring, it is very important to detect disturbances (sag, swell, transient, and interruption) accurately. In this paper, a detection method for power quality disturbances by combining the filter bank system and adaptive filter is proposed. To decompose power signal, binary tree structured filter bank system is designed. In the filter bank system, the fundamental filter bank(QMF bank) is used as a module in each decomposing level. An adaptive filter is used to improve the detection accuracy of disturbances for each subband signal. In the adaptive filter, the measure of estimated error change is used to detect singular points of power quality disturbances. Computer simulations were performed on synthetic signals which have disturbances to assess the performance of the proposed method.