Abstract: Several methods are currently used in time-frequency analysis of earthquake waves, such as Fourier transform, STFT, Gabor transform and wavelet transform. However, the selection of base functions for these methods is limited. Parametric adaptive time-frequency technique, which adopts a method of parametric adaptive signal decomposition and a related parametric adaptive time-frequency distribution, is introduced firstly. Then, adaptive sine, Gauss, wavelet decomposition is also introduced. Through the comparison of these methods, it is shown that adaptive time-frequency analysis method with parametric Gauss function has relatively higher accuracy and efficiency.