For successful guided-wave damage inspection, the appropriate signal processing of measured wave signals is very important. The objective of this paper is to introduce an efficient signal processing technique especially suitable for the guided-waves used for damage detection. The key idea of this technique is to model guided-waves by chirp functions of special form considering the dispersion phenomenon. To determine the parameter of the chirp functions simulating guided-waves, the matching pursuit algorithm is employed. The damage information in waveguides can be extracted by pulse-characterizing parameters. The effectiveness of present method is checked with the guided wave-based damage inspection.