Abstract: Aiming at the problems that the thermal wave image is subjected with the uneven heating, low signal-to-noise ratio and low defect contrast of the image, the paper proposes a kind of new ICA method based on wavelet transform and its application to the thermal wave image processing. The concept of virtual noise channel was introduced from high frequency component by wavelet transform and used to improve the performance in signal de-noising of ICA. The experiments indicate that good de-noised results can be obtained and the display of defects can be seen clearly with the method.