Pipeline leakage is the main reason that affects normal operation of the pipeline. In this paper, a feature recognition method for pipeline acoustic signals based on vocational mode decomposition (VMD) and exponential entropy (EE) is investigated, which could extract the characteristics of pipeline signals and further accurately identify the pipeline acoustic signals under different working conditions. First, the VMD is used to decompose the collected acoustic signals into a number of mode components, during which process the optimal mode number (i.e., K-value) is determined by combining local characteristic scale decomposition (LCD) and correlation analysis methods. Then, the characteristic content of each mode component is analyzed with the help of the determined correlation coefficient (CC) threshold. If the correlation coefficient of a mode component is greater than the threshold, then the mode component is selected as the feature component. Subsequently, the EE values of the selected feature components are calculated to form the feature vectors corresponding to different kinds of pipeline signals. Finally, the feature vectors are input into support vector machine (SVM) to classify and recognize the different pipeline states. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can identify the pipeline signals under different working conditions, and the recognition accuracy is up to [Formula: see text]. By analyzing and comparing with methods of EE-SVM, original data-SVM, VMD-singular spectrum entropy (SSE) and VMD-information entropy (IE), it is further verified that the proposed method is feasible and superior to the methods.