Abstract: The single hydrophone matched field localization for non-cooperative underwater acoustic pulse signals is studied. The frequency of underwater acoustic pulse signals is firstly estimated by means of designing the time-frequency distribution with adaptive radially-gaussian kernel according to the characteristic of nonstationary and short duration transient of underwater acoustic pulse signals. And then the ocean channel impulse can be calculated from an acoustic propagation model. Using the received signal of single hydrophone and the ocean channel pulse response, the replica signal for every grid location over search region can be estimated employing the least squares solution in the time domain. Finally, matched field localization of using single hydrophone for non-cooperative underwater acoustic pulse signals is realized by comparing the difference between the received signal and the replica signal yielding the ambiguity surface of localizer function. Simulation and sea-experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.