The corrosion behavior of reinforcing steel in cement mortar has been studied by electrochemical noise (EN) compared with the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The wavelet transform, as well as the statistical methods including the standard deviation of current noise (sigma(1)) and noise resistance (R-n), has been employed to analyze the EN data of reinforcing steel in mortar. It is revealed that there exist three different corrosion stages of reinforcing steel in cement mortar, including a competition process between breakdown and repassivation of passive film, a pitting development and an active corrosion during the 20 cyclic immersion and drying tests. The energy distribution plot (EDP) is able to provide useful information about the dominant process for the different corrosion stages. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.