Corrosion in pipeline is a significant problem in the oil industry and there is also much interest in reducing leak due to corrosion. Correlation techniques are widely used in leak detection, and these have been extremely effective when attempting to locate leaks in metal pipes. Acoustic emission is a new non-destructive pipeline inspection technology which can be used to monitor crucial part of pipelines and detect pipe corrosion or leak in real time. However, AE signals causing by corrosion and leak are liable to noise interference on field. Aiming at solving the noise interference problems and increase the detection sensitivity and location accuracy of the leak, advanced signal analysis method based on Empirical Mode Decomposition were researched. Empirical Mode Decomposition is a great breakthrough in non-stable signal analysis and it decomposes the signals into a sum of finite intrinsic mode functions (IMF), which have real physical meaning. In the experiment, the leak signals from a 30 m pipeline were decomposed into 9 intrinsic mode functions by EMD, among which some IMF components containing typical AE characteristic can be selected to reconstruct the signal, and thus intrinsic characteristic of leak signal could be extracted and noise interference would be eliminated. Location accuracy of the leaking hole calculated with the reconstructed signals based on EMD algorithm was increased 64%.Copyright © 2008 by ASME