Excavation equipment recognition attracts increasing attentions in recent years due to its significance in underground pipeline network protection and civil construction management. In this paper, a novel classification algorithm based on acoustics processing is proposed for four representative excavation equipments. New acoustic statistical features, namely, the short frame energy ratio, concentration of spectrum amplitude ratio, truncated energy range, and interval of pulse are first developed to characterize acoustic signals. Then, probability density distributions of these acoustic features are analyzed and a novel classifier is presented. Experiments on real recorded acoustics of the four excavation devices are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Comparisons with two popular machine learning methods, support vector machine and extreme learning machine, combined with the popular linear prediction cepstral coefficients are provided to show the generalization capability of our method. A real surveillance system using our algorithm is developed and installed in a metro construction site for real-time recognition performance validation.