The approach to damage detection and localization adopted in this paper is based on a statistical comparison of models built from the response time histories collected at different stages during the structure lifetime. Some of these time histories are known to have been recorded when the structural system was undamaged. The consistency of the models associated to two different stages, both undamaged, is first recognized. By contrast, the method detects the discrepancies between the models from measurements collected for a damaged situation and for the undamaged reference situation. The damage detection and localization is pursued by a comparison of the SSE (sum of the squared errors) histograms. The validity of the proposed approach is tested by applying it to the analytical benchmark problem developed by the ASCE Task Group on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). In the paper, the results of the benchmark studies are presented and the performance of the method is discussed.