AbstractA variety of tools for the identification of material parameters from inhomogeneous experiments already exist. These either use an FE solver as a subroutine or are directly integrated into an FE program. Thereby, it is usually assumed that the material parameters are constant among the whole specimen. This condition is not met when considering structured specimen which arise when investigating biological tissue or work pieces produced by massive forming, for instance. Here, the considered domain consists of different material types or areas with different material parameters. These are modeled by using multiple material domains. Frequently, the exact shape of the material domains is unknown and must identified as well. Both aspects, shape of the material domains and material parameters, influence the behaviour of the specimen considerably. Therefore, a separate identification yields poor results. In this paper an algorithm for the combined identification of material and geometrical properties is presented. In addition, the application on an academic example with two material domains using a simple porous media material model is demonstrated. (© 2012 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)