Abstract: Matching recognition plays an important role in the technical investigation line business unit，having a high real-time requirements of the algorithm. The symbol rate of M-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) signal is one of the important feature parameters for matching identification. According to analyze the effect of the channel disturbance on the signal, in the case of known modulation frequency set, a rapid algorithm is proposed in this paper. By means of detecting the signal’s peak value, smoothness, stating the distance of zero-crossing and clustering, this algorithm completes the estimation of the symbol rate. The experimental results prove that this algorithm get a better anti-noise property, joined the Doppler frequency shift and multi-path fading channel conditions still has high accuracy，and the computation is greatly reduced，especially suitable for matching recognition. The treatment of actual signal also shows the effectiveness and feasibility of this algorithm.