In order to identify the travel-time difference accurately in the experimental study of Rayleigh wave acoustoelastic effect, an experimental system is constructed by the ultrasonic pulser-receiver, digital oscilloscope, Rayleigh wave transmitter and receiver, and a personal computer. And then, the digital correlation method and the Fourier transform frequency analysis method are used to obtain the travel-time difference of the Rayleigh wave corresponding to different subsurface stress conditions. Furthermore, the simulated ultrasonic signals are used to verify the reliability of the two kinds of ultrasonic signal information extracting algorithms, respectively. Finally, the proposed signal processing methods are applied to extract the time delay between different Rayleigh wave signals corresponding to different subsurface stress level.