Abstract: In this paper we show the possibility of using local-wave to analyze the time-frequency feature of the acoustic emission signals produced by the crack in the offshore structure model. In the investigation, we used a local wave decomposition technique, allowing time series of acoustic emission signal being decomposed into a small number of intrinsic mode function components (IMF). Under the Hilbert transformation process, IMF can be translated into an expression called Hilbert spectra, which exhibits the amplitude-frequency-time distribution of the data. The marginal spectra, which present the energy-frequency distribution of the data, were obtained by integrating the Hilbert spectra with time. The feature of the offshore structure simulation acoustic emission signals could be extracted by applying local wave analysis. On the basis of local-wave analyzing, the characteristics of the crack acoustic emission signals in the offshore structure, was found which indicated the acoustic emission occurrence. Consequently, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to effectively capture the significant information reflecting the acoustic emission in the offshore structure, and thus has good potential in the field of acoustic emission signal feature extraction.