We introduce two enhanced wavelet-based methods to improve accuracy and optimize calculation efficiency for sonar time delay estimation. Existing time delay estimations provide poor results because of many environmental effects such as noise, multi path, and crosstalk. While advanced digital signal processing (DSP) techniques have been proposed to overcome these problems, they entail increased complexity and calculation time. We use prediction in the methods we propose; the position where the reflected wave starts to occur is predicted by a recognition technique. The results are much better and the calculation time is shorter than other methods that use DSP techniques. In the first method, the optimization procedure is applied in the time domain, while in the second method, the optimization is calculated in the wavelet domain. Numerical comparisons and simulations using synthetic signals are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhanced methods. We also demonstrate that our new algorithms are more stable than the existing ones and that the calculation time is reduced dramatically while maintaining increased accuracy, especially in a high-noise environment.