Recent developments in underwater image recognition methods have received large attention by the ocean engineering researchers. In this paper, an improved bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) approach is employed to decompose the given underwater image into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and residual. We developed a joint algorithm based on BEMD and Canny operator to extract multi-pixel edge features at multiple scales in IMFs sub-images. So the multiple pixel edge extraction is an advantage of our approach; the other contribution of this method is the realization of the bi-dimensional sifting process, which is realized utilizing regional-based operators to detect local extreme points and constructing radial basis function for curve surface interpolation. The performance of the multi-pixel edge extraction algorithm for processing underwater image is demonstrated in the contrast experiment with both the proposed method and the phase congruency edge detection.