Underwater ambient noise originating from geophysical, biological, and man-made acoustic sources contains information on the source and the ocean environment. Such noise affectsthe performance of sonar equipment. In this paper, three steps are used to identify the ambient noise source, detection, feature extraction, and similarity measurement. First, we use the zero-crossing rate to detect the ambient noisesource from background noise. Then, a set of feature vectors is proposed forthe ambient noise source using the Hilbert-Huang transform and the Karhunen-Loeve transform. Finally, the Euclidean distance is used to measure the similarity between the standard feature vector and the feature vector of the unknown ambient noise source. The developed algorithm is applied to the observed ocean data, and the results are presented and discussed.