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In the field of structural health monitoring, vibration-based damage identification remains a formidable challenge. Key to this challenge is the establishment of a reliable association between observed vibration characteristics and the actual state of structural damage (e.g. stiffness reduction). This association not only accurately indicates the presence of damage, but also the location and severity of the damage. To solve this complex pattern identification problem, a large number of approaches, including deep learning, have emerged in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new structural damage identification method that utilizes the vibration information of the structure and a convolutional neural network based on Alex NET improvement. The method consists of calculating the acceleration response power spectral density of damaged and undamaged structures under impact loading separately, and then making a difference between the two power spectral data, and subsequently introducing these power spectral difference data into the convolutional neural network for training. The use of power spectral density analysis as a preprocessing step converts the time-domain signals into frequency-domain signals, and this conversion allows the convolutional neural network to capture and learn from the specific frequency characteristics of the data, thus facilitating the learning process of the neural network model. In this paper, the effectiveness of the method is critically evaluated through numerical simulation and experimental validation, and 3% and 5% noise are added to the numerical study to test the robustness of the method. During the convolution neural network training process, the optimal training mean squared error (MSE) is 5 × 10−6 in the case of no noise addition; the optimal training MSE is 1.3 × 10−5 in the case of noise addition. Both the results of simulations and experiments confirm the high accuracy and good robustness of the method in localizing structural damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]