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Abstract: There exist several studies in the literature which have shown the potentiality offered by certain vibration-based techniques aimed at detecting damage in structural systems. In all these existing techniques noise (distributed and/or outliers) plays a significant role and can make the difference between a successful or an unsuccessful application. In spite of such a mentioned remarkable influence, the studies aimed at investigating the influence of noise on the success of the techniques are not as rich in experimental details as they are in numerical simulations. In this work an extensive set of experiments aimed at evaluating the feasibility of certain diagnosing techniques is provided. This work should also be considered as the experimental validation of certain analytical and numerical simulations carried out in the past [Gentile, A., Messina, A., 2003. On the continuous wavelet transforms applied to discrete vibrational data for detecting open cracks in damaged beams. International Journal of Solids and Structures 40, 295–315; Messina, A., 2004. Detecting damage in beams through digital differentiator filters and continuous wavelet transforms. Journal of Sound and Vibration 272, 385–412] within the frame of real measurements based on a particular laser technology; in addition, the mentioned validating experiments illustrate certain peculiarities not shown in the past, and, finally, valuable benchmarks are provided for testing future diagnosing techniques in numerical simulations. The experimental set-up consists of both commercial and electronic circuits appropriately designed and realized, whose significance, in the measuring system is accurately described in order to increase the signal/noise ratio of the dynamical measurements. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]