Earth surface vibrations generated by passing vehicles, excavation equipment, footsteps, etc., attract increasing attentions in the research community due to their wide applications. In this paper, we investigate the periodic vibration source localization problem, which has recently shown significance in excavation device detection and localization for urban underground pipeline network protection. An intelligent propagation distance estimation algorithm based on a novel fundamental frequency energy distribution (FBED) feature is developed for periodic vibration signal localization. Contributions of the paper lie in three aspects: 1) a novel frequency band energy distribution (FBED) feature is developed to characterize the property of vibrations at different propagation distances; 2) an intelligent propagation distance estimation model built on the FBED feature with machine learning algorithms is proposed, where for comparisons, the support vector machine (SVM) for regression and regularized extreme learning machine (RELM) are used; 3) a localization algorithm based on the distance-of-arrival (DisOA) estimation using three piezoelectric transducer sensors is given for source position estimation. To testify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, case studies on real collected periodic vibration signals generated by two electric hammers with different fundamental frequencies are presented in the paper. The transmission medium is the cement road and experiments on vibration signals recorded at different propagation distances are conducted. (c) 2017 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.