In this paper an on-going research effort aimed at detecting and localizing damage in plate-like structuresby using mode shape curvature based damage detection algorithm is described. The proposed damageindex uses exclusively mode shape curvature data from the damaged structure. This method was origi-nally developed for beam-like structures. In this paper, the method is generalized to plate-like structureswhich are characterized by two-dimensional mode shape curvature. To calculate mode shape curvaturesfrom the measured mode shapes, three approaches are proposed: the first one is the well-known cen-tral difference approximation, the other two are classical approaches based on Tikhonov’s regularizationtechnique with smoothing functional. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed damage detec-tion algorithms are demonstrated experimentally on an aluminium plate containing mill-cut damage.The validity of the method is assessed by comparing the identification results of the experimental testcase to the results obtained from the simulated test case. The modal frequencies and the correspondingmode shapes of the aluminium plate are obtained via finite element models for numerical simulationsand by using a scanning laser vibrometer (SLV) for the experimental study.