Spectrum peak detection in the laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is an essential step, but the presence of background and noise seriously disturb the accuracy of peak position. The present paper proposed a method applied to automatic peak detection for LIBS spectrum in order to enhance the ability of overlapping peaks searching and adaptivity. We introduced the ridge peak detection method based on continuous wavelet transform to LIBS, and discussed the choice of the mother wavelet and optimized the scale factor and the shift factor. This method also improved the ridge peak detection method with a correcting ridge method. The experimental results show that compared with other peak detection methods (the direct comparison method, derivative method and ridge peak search method), our method had a significant advantage on the ability to distinguish overlapping peaks and the precision of peak detection, and could be be applied to data processing in LIBS.