The invention provides an underwater acoustic leading signal detection method based on an accumulative correlation coefficient (ACC) under a sparse channel, which is applied to an underwater acoustic communication system under the sparse channel and can be used for reducing the false detection rate of leading signals, increasing the detection rate, improving the detection performance of the system, and increasing the communication efficiency of the system. The method comprises the following steps: performing sparse signal reconstruction and OMP algorithms, achieving the separation of main paths of the sparse channel by using a reconstruction process of the signals, calculating the relevancy between the signals of each path and the transmitted signals, accumulating to obtain a correlation coefficient, and performing leading signal detection based on the correlation coefficient. Compared with the prior art, the underwater acoustic leading signal detection method provided by the invention has the advantages as follows: 1, the method has strong robustness under additive white Gaussian noises and different types of interference; 2, compared with a detection technique based on a matching filter, the method has better detection performance under multi-path channels; and 3, compared with other prior arts, the method has more ideal detection performance under complicated and changeable actual underwater environments.