The results of sediment classification are affected by the measurement environment. The water depth has a significant impact on the sound propagation, and the acoustic characteristics will be different under different water depths. In addition, seabed topography, sediment types and their distribution, acoustic frequency, equipment types and settings, and suspended substances in water will all affect the original sonar data. In order to obtain accurate classification results, a seabed sonar image classification method based on Elm AdaBoost is proposed. The original sound intensity data is compensated for gain and the anomaly is eliminated. After preprocessing the multi beam sonar data, the image texture feature is extracted from the gray level co-occurrence matrix as the feature vector for classification, and the elm classifier is constructed. The elm is enhanced by AdaBoost. The calculated feature is input into the elm AdaBoost network for sediment classification, and the result is output. Simulation results show that the proposed method effectively improves the accuracy of sediment classification, and verifies the feasibility of this method.