Abstract: It’s important to identify structural modal parameters, especially the mode shapes in time and accurately for accurate damage identification and health monitoring of structures. Normally, lots of time domain modal identification methods are generally achieved by curve fitting or calculating eigenvalues process. Mode shape matrix is obtained by calculating various modal residues. These methods depend on the identifying modal frequency and modal damping ratio. In this paper, a novel method based on FastICA for mode shapes identification is proposed. This method uses the independence between the modal responses to create the object function, and obtains the optimal solutions of the mode shape matrix by optimizing the object function. It extracts the mode shapes directly from the free responses or the pulse responses of structures. An numerical application of three DOF(degrees of freedom) is performed and shows the efficiency of this method, which gives a high identification accuracy and a good robust to the measuring noises.