Most of the existing fingerprint identification techniques are unable to distinguish different wireless transmitters, whose emitted signals are highly attenuated, long-distance propagating, and of strong similarity to their transient waveforms. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method to identify different wireless transmitters based on compressed sensing. A data acquisition system is designed to capture the wireless transmitter signals. Complex analytical wavelet transform is used to obtain the envelope of the transient signal, and the corresponding features are extracted by using the compressed sensing theory. Feature selection utilizing minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) is employed to obtain the optimal feature subsets for identification. The results show that the proposed method is more efficient for the identification of wireless transmitters with similar transient waveforms.