Abstract: The configurational asymmetry of main pulses always hinders the quantitative identification for near fault pulse-like earthquake records. On account of adaptive decomposition capacity provided by the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), a method using the Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) reconstruction was presented in this paper for pulse-like identification. An IMF reconstruction approach was developed to denoise and smooth the signal, then the peak-point method (PPM) was applied to define the period of single main pulse, and the energy of single pulse was the ultimate step to identify pulse-like ground motion and the corresponding criteria were composed. Furthermore, the approach was extended to the identification for multi-pulses-like records. Finally, pulse-like significance in arbitrary orientations was tested to verify the method. Results show that the proposed method is more applicable in earthquake engineering due to its advantages in configurational asymmetrical pulse determination.