A novel image denoising method based on curvelet transform is proposed in order to improve the performance of Doppler frequency extraction in low signal-noise-ratio (SNR) environment. The echo can be represented as a gray image with spectral intensity as its gray values by time-frequency transform. And the curvelet coefficients of the image are computed. Then an adaptive soft-threshold scheme based on dual-median operation is implemented in curvelet domain. After that, the image is reconstructed by inverse curvelet transform and the Doppler curve is extracted by a curve detection scheme. Experimental results show the proposed method can improve the detection of Doppler frequency in low SNR environment.