Ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs) in fluid-filled pipes are subject to more severe dispersion and coherent noise than those of vacant pipes, posing significant challenges for defect identification and localization. To this end, a novel sparse signal decomposition method called multistrategy hybrid dung beetle optimization based orthogonal matching pursuit (MHDBO-OMP) using dispersive Hanning-windowed chirplet model was proposed, of which the model not only represents the nonlinear frequency and asymmetric envelope of the dispersive UGW, but also contains the mode and propagation distance information, and this model exhibits better matching and interpretability than the other UGW models. For dispersive perturbed UGW signals with multiple modes and features, MHDBO-OMP achieves high reconstruction accuracy in both signal reconstruction (RES < 0.3) and propagation distance estimation (RES < 3 cm). When applied to experimental UGW signals obtained from water/oil-filled pipes containing cracks and corrosion pits, MHDBO-OMP successfully reconstructs dispersion-compensated signals that solely contain feature signals, and the minimum location error is 0.72 cm while the average location error is 2.65 cm. © 2001 Elsevier Science. All rights reserved.