Although linear channel estimation for the frequency selective fading channel has been widely deployed, its accuracy depends on the number of pilots to probe the channel. Thus, it is unavoidable to employ large number of pilots to enhance the channel estimation performance, which essentially leads to the degradation of the transmission efficiency. It even does not utilize the sparseness of the multipath channel. In this paper a sparse channel estimation scheme based on the matching pursuit algorithm and a pilot assignment method, which minimizes the coherence, are proposed. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm shows superior channel estimation performance with fewer pilots to the LS based ones.