Abstract. High impedance fault has always been difficult for distribution network fault identification due to its unobvious fault signature and difficult detection. This paper decomposed the transient signal in multi-scale by utilizing the good localization performance of the wavelet in both time domain and frequency domain, reconstructed the wavelet coefficients under each scale, took the wavelet reconstruction coefficient which was under the scale 3, calculated the size spectrum of each feeder line in timing floating window and identified the circuits in which the faults lined according to the value of the size spectrum. The high impedance fault simulation system was built based upon the study of the various transient signals in power systems, and the high impedance fault simulation analysis of the distribution feeder was undertaken through PSCAD simulation platform using high impedance fault model. Simulation analysis showed that the method could effectively extract the feature of high impedance fault on high impedance fault identification.