Fringe center method is an important demodulation method for electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe. The precondition of this method is to obtain fringe skeletons with high precision. Based on the analysis of carrierwave electronic interferometry fringe characteristics, a fringe skeletons extracting method based on modulation direction was proposed. Firstly, a homomorphic filtering was used to filter the high frequency multiplicative speckle pattern noise effectively and pick out carrierwave fringes. Then a fringe skeletons extracting algorithm based on modulation direction was applied to confirm the dots of gray scale extremum and make binarization processing. In order to get whole fringe skeletons map, the mending methods based on skeletons curve fitting or based on the fringe separation were adopted to compensate the edge fringe skeletons. Experimental results show that this method is simple and reliable. It can extract the consecutive fringe skeletons quickly and accurately.