Subsea cables are important channels for international interconnection and power transmission. Traditional subsea cable operation and maintenance approaches rely on underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). This method is time-consuming, labour-intensive, and uneconomical due to insufficient autonomy and strong dependence on surface ship auxiliary. This paper proposes an intelligent detection scheme for simultaneous electromagnetic localization and autonomous tracking of subsea cables based on an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with an electromagnetic system. The dual triaxial electromagnetic array carried by AUV is designed to calculate the spatial location of the subsea cable. The localization results are used to design the AUV tracking guidance law, and the underactuation problem is solved. At the AUV kinetic level, the command filter and adaptive neural network are designed to solve the constraints of electromagnetic noise, unknown dynamic parameters and complex ocean current interferences. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed autonomous detection and tracking control scheme for subsea cables are verified by comparative simulation studies.