In this paper, the probabilistic exclusion based orthogonal matching pursuit (PEOMP) algorithm for the sparse signal reconstruction is proposed. Some of recent greedy algorithms such as CoSaMP, gOMP, BAOMP improved the reconstruction performance by deleting unsuitable atoms at each iteration. They still often fail to converge to the solution because the support set could not escape from a local minimum. PEOMP helps to escape by excluding a random atom in the support set according to a well-chosen probability function. Experimental results show that PEOMP outperforms several OMP based algorithms and the $l_1$ optimization method in terms of exact reconstruction probability.