Tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) technology combined with wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS) technology is an important technique for trace gas detection. Detected with the lock-in amplifier, the second harmonic signal obtained after demodulation is analyzed to get the gas absorption information. However, the second harmonic signal is affected by noise which reduces the accuracy and stability of the detection system. To improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the TDLAS detection system, a denoising method based on Gabor transform is proposed for second harmonic signal noise reduction. Taking the CH4 absorption spectrum at 1 653.72 nm as an example, the effectiveness of the noise reduction method is verified through simulation and experiments. The simulation results show that the signal to noise ratio for the second harmonic signal of 0 dB can be improved 15.73 dB with Gabor transform-based denoising method. Experimental results show that with the Gabor transform-based denoising method, the linear correlation coefficient r can be as high as 0.996 59 between the second harmonic peak value and the CH4 concentration in the range of 0.001%~0.02%. At the same time, the detection accuracy and stability of the system have been improved significantly.