Despite the availability of pipeline bending strain detection technologies based on inertial measurement unit (IMU), there is a lack of intelligent and efficient methods for accurately identifying pipeline features by bending strain. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method for identifying features in natural gas pipelines based on shapelet and blending fusion model. Specifically, the shape features of the bending strain data are extracted and transformed by shapelet. Then a blending fusion model with SVM, Decision Tree and Gradient Boosting as base learners and Random Forest as meta-learner is constructed. Finally, the extracted features are fed into the blending fusion model for pipeline feature recognition. The model is trained with bending strain data obtained from a real natural gas pipeline, the results indicate that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method is 97.17%. Compared with other models, the superiority of the proposed model is verified, and it is proved that the proposed method has better accuracy than the existing models (over 1.3%). Overall, the method proposed in this paper can be effectively combined with the in-line inspection system to provide a reference for pipeline companies to carry out pipeline integrity management.