The issue of crack detection and its diagnosis has gained a wide spread of industrial interest. The crack/damage affects the industrial economic growth. So early crack detection is an important aspect in the point of view of any industrial growth. In this paper a design tool ANSYS is used to monitor various changes in vibrational characteristics of thin transverse cracks on a cantilever beam for detecting the crack position and depth and was compared using artificial intelligence techniques. The usage of neural networks is the key point of development in this paper. The three neural networks used are cascade forward back propagation (CFBP) network, feed forward back propagation (FFBP) network, and radial basis function (RBF) network. In the first phase of this paper theoretical analysis has been made and then the finite element analysis has been carried out using commercial software, ANSYS. In the second phase of this paper the neural networks are trained using the values obtained from a simulated model of the actual cantilever beam using ANSYS. At the last phase a comparative study has been made between the data obtained from neural network technique and finite element analysis.