Robust damage localization in plate-type structures by using an enhanced robust principal component analysis and data fusion technique

•A robust damage feature extraction method is proposed based on robust principal component analysis with contiguous outlier constraint.•A novel data fusion approach is developed based on cosine similarity measure for robust damage localization.•A multiscale denoising method is proposed to deal with different noise levels by tuning its scale parameter.•The proposed damage localization method is experimentally validated by using non-contact full-field laser scanning measurements.