Abstract: The conventional active intelligent identification method for rail damage takes a long time in the process of collecting rail damage data, resulting in a longer intelligent identification time for rail damage. Therefore, an active intelligent identification method for rail damage based on ultrasound was proposed. Based on ultrasonic technology, the echo signal and rail damage echo signal were obtained according to the gain range, and the filter of ultrasonic transducer was set to convert the signal to collect data. According to the DBSCAN algorithm, the smallest unit for damage identification was used as a unit to combine the collected ultrasonic data to form an ultrasonic information group, and the data was divided. The rail damage features were matched according to the divided data. Finally, Using the AlexNet network architecture as the main identification structure, based on data matching results, a dataset of displayed samples was established to conduct a precise search for damage types, thus obtaining active intelligent identification results for rail damage. The experimental results showed that the method proposed in this paper had a shorter time for identifying active rail damage, and can achieve rapid identification of active rail damage, which has good application value.