Abstract: Aiming at the technical difficulties of rapid damage identification for a large-scale manned submersible with complex structural system under deck loading, this paper introduces the vibration testing method into the recognition of structural damage of manned submersibles. A fast evaluation method for the structural damage of the manned submersible is proposed and a wavelet-based approach is employed in this paper. Discrete dyadic wavelet transform is used to separate the modal information superimposed in the vibration response signal, and then the energy value is obtained through wavelet packet transform. The damage index of joint damage assessment method is defined by combining them. The experimental analysis results prove that the joint assessment method can effectively identify the difference between the damage site and the non-destructive site in the manned submersible structure. The damage assessment method can be applied to deep-sea transport equipment.