A traveling wave detection method based on Wigner-Ville time-frequency analysis is proposed by analyzing the time-frequency characteristics of measured signals of the special traveling wave sensors. In this method, the transmission characteristics of the fault traveling wave signal are analyzed by the system modeling and Simulation of the transmission line, wave trapper, CVT and the special traveling wave sensor. The Wigner-Ville distribution is used to analyze the time-frequency characteristics of aerial mode component of traveling wave signals, and the major energy frequency band can be selected by the cross term temporal aggregation. Then, the evolutionary spectrum of the major energy frequency band is obtained to detect the traveling wave signal. The simulation results show that this method can detect the traveling wave signal accurately and effectively according to the signals measured by the special traveling wave sensor compared with the two methods of WT and HHT, and the fault location result can meet the requirement of engineering accuracy.