A method for identifying the material constants of an elastic/visco-plastic meterial under tensile impact loading is proposed. In this method, the Kalman filter and the finite element method are used together with a few test data. To obtain data for high strain rates, notched specimens are employed, because arbitrarily shaped specimens are available in this method. To increase the accuracy of identification, a test under a relatively low strain rate is needed in addition to a test under a high strain rate. The optimum strain rate is determined in such a way that the largest eigen value of the covariance matrix of the estimated parameters becomes minimum. A numerical simulation in performed to demonstrate the validity and usefulness of this method