In this paper, a robust method is proposed to detect the damage severity and location of structural elements, focusing on the data type and acquisition method and aiming to the promotion of model updating tools. The novelty of this method is rotational mode shape acquisition, which provides valuable information on the damage. In this method, the damaged elements are indirectly identified by detecting the healthy elements and eliminating them from search space. This method minimizes the modal strain energy difference between the damaged reference model and the numerical model via an optimization algorithm. An improved genetic algorithm is then used to perform the optimization task. In this study, four numerical and two experimental damage scenarios are applied on a simply supported beam to examine the performance of the proposed method. Data acquisition systems are implemented using vision-based and accelerometer-based methods. The results demonstrate that this method can accurately identify the location and severity of damage merely using the first mode shape, since the rotational mode shapes are more sensitive to damage than the vertical mode shapes.