In the process of the sonar image textures produced, the orientation and scale factors are very significant. However, most of the related methods ignore the directional information and scale invariance or just pay attention to one of them. To overcome this problem, we apply Gabor wavelet to extract the features of sonar images, which combine the advantages of both the Gabor filter and traditional wavelet function. The mother wavelet is designed with constrained parameters and the optimal parameters will be selected at each orientation, with the help of bandwidth parameters based on the Fisher criterion. The Gabor wavelet can have the properties of both multi-scale and multi-orientation. Based on our experiment, this method is more appropriate than traditional wavelet or single Gabor filter as it provides the better discrimination of the textures and improves the recognition rate effectively. Meanwhile, comparing with other fusion methods, it can reduce the complexity and improve the calculation efficiency.