Abstract: The existing technologies for buried pipeline localization are difficult to determine the depth of polyethylene pipelines, and the detection error for pipeline direction is often significant. To solve this problem, an acoustic imaging method based on optimized time domain stacking is proposed. The method is used to eliminate direct wave and surface wave, extract reflected wave and perform imaging positioning processing on simulation signals, which verifies the feasibility of the method. Finally, the pipeline localization experiments are carried out on the polyethylene pipes with buried depths of 0.4 m and 1.0 m respectively. The experimental results show that the maximum pipeline positioning errors are 0.179 m and 0.240 m, respectively. This indicates that the proposed method may meet the requirements of PE pipeline detection under better buried conditions.