Ship seismic wave signal is a non-stationary signal. In the case of low signal- to-noise ratio, the traditional spectral analysis method is not easy to detect its time domain characteristics and frequency domain ones. Here, the time-frequency characteristics of ship seismic wave signals were analyzed with the STFT method and the RI-ALE-MUSIC algorithm. The results showed that ship seismic wave signals have a specific line-spectrum structure in time-frequency domain; the RI-ALE-MUSIC time-frequency algorithm can be used to effectively detect ship targets in the case of low signal-to-noise ratio, it greatly increases the detection distance of the system.