During the detection of pipeline leakages, false alarms of leak detection could be markedly reduced if the interference signals resulting from pressure regulating, pump regulating or valve movements could be accurately distinguished. A digital recognition method for interference signals and leakage signals based on a dual-sensor system is proposed in this paper. It is demonstrated that the direction of the signal can be recognized by a cross-correlation calculation between two signals from the dual-sensor, one of which undergoes forward linear interpolation and backward linear interpolation. Based on this theory, the interference signal and the leak signal can be discriminated exactly, and the distance between the two sensors in the dual-sensor system can be considerably reduced without needing to increase the sampling frequency. The monotonicity of the cross-correlation function is demonstrated, and a fast discrimination algorithm based on a binary extreme search method, which decreases the computational load and maintains global optimization, is also proposed. A pre-processing method of the actual signal is proposed to decrease the identity requirement for the two sensors in a dual-sensor system. In the experiment based on artificial signals, the proposed discrimination algorithm could achieve accurate recognition of the abnormal signal, and as such, the theory and application of pipeline leak detection based on dual-sensor systems are extended. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.