The leakage of oil/gas pipelines is one of the major factors to influence the safe operation of pipelines. So it is significant to detect and locate the exact pipeline leakage. A novel leak location method based on characteristic entropy is proposed to extract the input feature vectors. In this approach, the combination of wavelet packet and information entropy is called "wavelet packet characteristic entropy" (WP-CE). The combination of empirical mode decomposition and information entropy is called "empirical mode decomposition characteristic entropy" (EMD-CE). Both pressure signal and flow signal of low noise and high noise of pipeline leakage are decomposed to extract the characteristic entropy. The location of pipeline leak is determined by the combination of the characteristic entropy as the input vector and particle swarm optimization and support vector machine method (PSO-SVM). The results of proposed leak location method are compared with those of PSO-SVM based on physical parameters. Under the condition of high noise, the results of proposed leak location method are better than those of PSO-SVM based on physical parameters. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.