In this paper, a technique called 'excitelet' is presented for the imaging of damage in structures using the correlation of the signals measured at elements of piezoceramic arrays with dispersed versions of the excitation signal. This approach is presented as an extension of classical imaging techniques and takes advantage of the chirplet-based matching pursuit algorithm. The applicability for sparse and compact arrays is investigated experimentally on an aluminum plate and comparison with the existing embedded ultrasonic structural radar (EUSR) algorithm is performed for A0 and S0 modes for three frequency ranges of interest. Significant improvement of imaging quality is demonstrated with respect to imaging techniques using time-of-flight (ToF) and group velocity considerations for both sparse and compact piezoceramic array arrangements.