Considering the influence of Lamb wave dispersion on the precision of damage detection, a new detection method of scattering source based on time frequency curves and ellipse localization method is proposed. Empirical mode decomposition(EMD) is used to decompose the scattering signal into finite narrowband signals, and a modified continuous wavelet transform(CWT) is further used to get the time frequency distribution(TFD) of the detected signal, and the arriving time of different frequency component is estimated based on TFD. A series of location results can be obtained from different frequency components using ellipse localization method. The damage position can finally be estimated by synthesizing localization results at different frequencies. Experiments on aluminum plate are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. EMD CWT analysis can get precise time frequency curves in highly dispersive low frequency band of A0 mode. The damage location results is more accurate and the influence from occasional factors can be suppressed by using the synthesized method.