The vibration of a cylindrical shell is generated due to elastic waves propagating on the shell. Those elastic waves include propagating waves such as flexural, longitudinal and shear waves. Those also include non-propagating decaying waves, i.e. evanescent waves. In order to separate contributions of each type of waves to the data for the vibration of the cylindrical shell, spatial signal processing techniques for wavenumber analysis are investigated in this paper. Those techniques include Fast Fourier transform(FFT) algorithm, Extended Prony method and Overdetermined Modified Extended Prony method(OMEP). Those techniques have been applied to identify the waves from simulated vibration signals with various signal-to-noise ratios. Futhermore, the experimental data for in-plane vibration of the cylindrical shell has been processed with those techniques to identify propagating waves(longitudinal, shear and flexural waves) and evanescent waves.