The leak of gas pipelines can be detected and located by the acoustic method. The technologies of recognizing and extracting wave characteristics are summarized in details in this paper, which is to distinguish leaking and disturbing signals from time and frequency domain. A high-pressure and long distance leak test loop is designed and established by similarity analysis with field transmission pipelines. The acoustic signals collected by sensors are de-noised by wavelet transform to eliminate the background noises, and time-frequency analysis is used to analyze the characteristics of frequency domain. The conclusion can be drawn that most acoustic signals are concentrated on the ranges of 0–100 Hz. The acoustic signal recognition and extraction methods are verified and compared with others and it proves that the disturbing signals can be efficiently removed by the analysis of time and frequency domain, while the new characteristics of the accumulative value difference, mean value difference and peak value difference of signals in adjacent intervals can detect the leak effectively and decrease the false alarm rate significantly. The formula for leak location is modified with consideration of the influences of temperature and pressure. The positioning accuracy can be significantly improved with relative error between 0.01% and 1.37%. ► The best methods for acoustic signal recognition and extraction are summarized and validated. ► Time-frequency analysis is used to the acoustic signals to analyze the characteristic of frequency domain. ► Leakage location correlation is improved. ► The relative errors of leakage location are controlled in the range between 0.01% and 1.37%.