Abstract: Ship wake is the bubble group formed at the tail of the ship due to the cavitation of the propellers and the friction between the water and the side wall of the ship in the course of navigation. The multi-beam imaging technology for ship wake can be used to detect the sound scattering intensity of the wake. In order to better study the characteristics of the wake, the image visualization processing of the original sonar data is adopted. However, the original wake image after processing is doped with noise, and especially when the sea surface reflection is strong, part of the wake image could be completely mixed with the reflected image of the sea surface. Therefore, it is necessary to find a suitable algorithm to extract the edge of the wake image. The applications of several edge segmentation algorithms, such as the differential operators, the mathematical morphology-based and fractal-based algorithms are studied in this paper. The advantages and disadvantages of different algorithms are summarized by comparison and verification.