Because of the strong interferences, such as discrete spectrum interferences (DSI), white noise and pulse-shaped interferences, it is still a difficult work to extract the partial discharge (PD) signal for transformer online monitoring techniques. Through deeply study on the automatic selection of threshold value and mother wavelet, the wavelet-based de-noising method for partial discharge signals is proposed. The analyzing results on simulation signal and field-measured signal indicate that the proposed method is fit for de-noising white noise but for DSI the comparably worse de-noising results is acquired. Hence it is predicted that good de-noising results will be achieved with the wavelet-based de-noising method combined with digital filtering method fitting for de-noising DSI.