Patent ID: 7908095

Claim:
A method for detecting damages in a metal structure, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of sensor signals from an array of sensors mounted on a structure; determining featured signal windows of selected signal components for each of the plurality of sensor signals of the array of sensors mounted on the structure; extracting selected signal components from each of a plurality of current sensor signals of the sensor array using the featured signal windows; matching the extracted signal components with corresponding signal components of a plurality of baseline sensor signals previously detected in the structure with the sensor array; computing respective indices I S0 and I A0 for each of the matched extracted current and baseline signal components based on the respective signal energies thereof; and, determining the presence of a damage in the structure if either of the indices I S0 and I A0 of at least a specified number of neighboring sensor paths of the structure is greater than selected threshold values of I S0 and I A0 .