Characteristics extraction has a great effect on the audio training and recognition in the audio recognition system. MFCC algorithm is a typical characteristics extraction method with stable performance and high recognition rate. For the situation that MFCC has a large amount of computation, an improved algorithm MFCC_E is introduced. The computation of MFCC_E is reduced by 50% compared with the standard algorithm MFCC, and it make the hardware implementation is easy. The experimental result indicated that MFCC_E and MFCC have the same recognition rate roughly, yet the computational complexity of MFCC_E is much smaller.