Aiming at the non-stationarity of ship seismic wave signal,Hilbert-Huang transform(HHT)is applied to the ship seismic wave signal analysis,and the real-time detection algorithm for ship seismic wave signal is proposed based on Hilbert energy spectrum. First,the HHT analysis of the measured seismic wave signal is performed to obtain the time spectrum,the marginal spectrum,the instantaneous energy spectrum and the Hilbert energy spectrum of the signal. Then,based on the characteristics of the Hilbert energy spectrum of the ship seismic wave signal,the energy in the specific frequency band of the Hilbert energy spectrum is selected as the detection feature quantity,and the sliding window is used to update the feature quantity and the corresponding adaptive threshold value. Finally,according to certain detection rules,a real-time detection algorithm for ship seismic wave signals is proposed. The measured data and simulation data show that the detection algorithm can complete the detection of the target signal in real time and has a far detection distance. The detection probability reaches 100% when the signal-to-noise ratio is –10 dB.