Morlet wavelet is suitable to extract the impulse components of mechanical fault signals.And thus its continuous wavelet transform (CWT) has been successfully used in the field of fault diagnosis. The principle of scale selection in CWT is discussed. Based on genetic algorithm, an optimization strategy for the waveform parameters of the mother wavelet is proposed with wavelet entropy as the optimization target. Based on the optimized waveform parameters, the wavelet scalogram is used to analyze the simulated acoustic emission (AE) signal and real AE signal of rolling bearing.The results indicate that the proposed method is useful and efficient to improve the quality of CWT.