Edge wave detection is a key technology in steel plate quality inspection, which is beneficial to improve the production quality of steel products and the efficiency of enterprises. In this letter, a novel algorithm based on visual projection and pixel statistics is proposed to detect the edge wave using 3D camera. The proposed algorithm firstly uses a series of image preprocessing to effectively remove the influence of irrelevant interference, and transforms the colour image into the binary image. Subsequently, three key positions of the edge wave in range image are precisely determined based on visual projection and pixel statistics. Finally, two 3D cameras are used to acquire the range images to evaluate the proposed algorithm's performance. The results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately detect the edge wave instead of human eye detection.