Abstract: The present optical signal feature extraction methods of ship wake still have a lot of problems such as complex operation and slow processing speed. Histogram extraction method of optical signal feature of ship wake was researched in this paper. As the ship wake image histogram was provided with obvious bimodal characteristic, peak point distribution density and the ratio of pixel gray value were used to characterize the optical signal feature strength of ship wake, and the feature was analyzed by the specialized feature extraction experiment device. Feature extraction experiment results show that the two feature parameters can reliably describe the optical signal feature strength of ship wake, and the advantages of the method are simple and fast. From reading a ship wake image to calculating its value by using Matlab software, computer processing time is approximately 0.07 s.