The invention relates to a rapid detection method for the shallow surface layer quality of a concrete structure, and belongs to the technical field of engineering detection. According to the method, an elastic wave vibration exciter and a pickup sensor are mounted on a "small-permutation" detection device according to geometric permutation and combination; the vibration exciter generates elastic waves through transient impact on the surface of the structure; the pickup sensor receives the elastic waves propagated along a medium; same-source multi-channel elastic wave data is formed by each excitation; the "small-permutation" detection device moves synchronously, and obtains a multi-source multi-channel elastic wave data body; the same-source multi-channel elastic wave data is processed toobtain same-source multi-channel direct head wave data; and the same-source multi-channel direct head wave data is subjected to spectrum analysis and adjacent-channel quality spectrum calculation sequentially to obtain a multi-source adjacent-channel quality spectrum data body, then stacking and averaging are performed on same-measuring-point data to obtain a stacked quality spectrum data body ofthe shallow surface layer medium, and then spatial conversion, mathematical interpolation and two-dimensional and three-dimensional imaging are performed on the stacked quality spectrum data body of the shallow surface layer medium to obtain a detection result. According to the method, the detection precision and the detection speed are improved.