With the development of the information age, the transmission rate and transmission capacity of information continue to increase. As a wireless communication method to achieve high bit rate communication, space laser communication plays an increasingly obvious role in global communications. In the current space laser communication system, the optical communication terminal uses a detector to detect the position of the received optical signal, and then the servo mechanism on it performs facula tracking. However, when a four-quadrant detector (4QD) is used to detect optical signal, the received optical signal generally contains three main types of noise, which are background radiation noise, shot noise and thermal noise. These three kinds of noise can be equivalent to Gaussian white noise. In this paper, a single-frequency cosine signal is used to modulate the intensity of the optical signal received by the 4QD, and then the modulated optical signal is detected by a spectrum analysis method based on the cross-correlation algorithm. This method reduces the relative error of the spectral line amplitude when the SNR is -5dB from 2.23% to 0.88%, and reduces the relative error of the spectral line amplitude when the SNR is -20dB from 17.6% to 5.49%. Therefore, this method can well suppress Gaussian white noise and improve the detection accuracy of modulated optical signal under extremely low SNR conditions. © 2021 SPIE.