This study has two main objectives: (1) to examine the availability of a filtering scheme developed by Mi et al (2005, Phys. Rev. E 71, 066304) on the measured velocity signal and (2) to investigate the centerline characteristic scales of a plane jet with the exit Reynolds number of Re = 13188. The success of the filtering scheme has been well validated. It is found that the existence of the high-frequency noise impairs not only the small-scale properties of turbulence but also those associated with large-scale turbulence. After filtering the noise, while the dissipation rate of turbulence kinetic energy is correctly obtained, the characteristic scales of turbulent flow (i.e. the Kolmogorov and Taylor turbulence micro-scales and the integral scale) are appropriately estimated. The results reveal that the centerline characteristic scales of the plane jet exhibit a linear dependence on the downstream distance (x) at x ≤ 20 h, where h is the height of the nozzle. It is interesting to note that the statistical properties of small-scale turbulence appear to enter their self-preserving state earlier than those of large-scale turbulence in the jet. To our knowledge, this finding has not been reported in the literature.