Diffracted seismic waves may be used to help identify and track geologically heterogeneous bodies or zones. However, the energy of diffracted waves is weaker than that of reflections. Therefore, the extraction of diffracted waves is the basis for the effective utilization of diffracted waves. Based on the difference in travel times between diffracted and reflected waves, we developed a method for separating the diffracted waves via singular value decomposition filters and presented an effective processing flowchart for diffracted wave separation and imaging. The research results show that the horizontally coherent difference between the reflected and diffracted waves can be further improved using normal move-out (NMO) correction. Then, a band-rank or high-rank approximation is used to suppress the reflected waves with better transverse coherence. Following, separation of reflected and diffracted waves is achieved after the filtered data are transformed into the original data domain by inverse NMO. Synthetic and field examples show that our proposed method has the advantages of fewer constraints, fast processing speed and complete extraction of diffracted waves. And the diffracted wave imaging results can effectively improve the identification accuracy of geological heterogeneous bodies or zones.