In this Letter, the authors propose to apply the harmonic regeneration noise reduction (HRNR)-based Wiener filter (W-HRNR) to detect acoustic emission (AE) signal from the noisy environment. HRNR technique can regenerate the harmonics to overcome the distortion which occurs with overestimation of conventional Wiener filter and to preserve the essential signal content for accurate detection of AE signal. W-HRNR is implemented in short-time Fourier transform domain. Decision direct method is employed to estimate the spectral gain and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the signal in each frame. Evaluation of the algorithm is carried out using peak-SNR (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE). The performance of the proposed algorithm has been demonstrated using a simulated AE burst signal and AE signals acquired from compression test and drilling test. Results have proven the remarkable performance of W-HRNR over existing conventional Wiener filter for AE with accurate detection by preserving the useful signal information even under high noise conditions at low frequencies. Moreover, W-HRNR also achieved a significant improvement in PSNR and MSE over the conventional filter.