In order to solve the problems that it is difficult to directly measure the damping force provided by the damper of passive energy dissipation structure, and it is difficult to evaluate the performance and state of the damper, in this paper, a structural identification method based on adaptive extended Kalman filter is proposed and the method is applied to the damper characteristic identification of passive energy dissipation structures. Under the condition that the damper model is known, the damper parameters can be identified; under the condition that the damper model is unknown, the additional damping force provided by the damper can be considered as the unknown excitation and can also be identified by the proposed method. A multi-storey shear frame structure and a multi-storey damper controlled structure are used as numerical examples, and a single-storey damper controlled structure is used as experimental example to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. The proposed method can provide more basis for the characteristic identification and performance evaluation of the dampers in the passive energy dissipation structure.