In recent years,most existing engineering structures which have approached their normal life span, such as concrete plate, concrete beam etc., Almost all of these architecture structures are subjected to damage due to external loads, initial design defect etc. Structural damage detection and assessment has been becoming a focus of increasing interest in civil engineering field. However,At present, the study on structural damage detection is still at initial stage and the adopted main approaches are theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, but physical models are scarce. This leads to the yielded theories and methods are not sufficiently applicable for practical engineering application. Aiming at this, this paper focuses on developing effective methods of using wavelet and neural networks to detect the damage of elastic thin plate due to their extensive applications in civil engineering.