Vibration measurements for structural health monitoring (SHM) by operational modal analysis (OMA) are classically obtained from sensors that are embedded in or physically attached to the monitored structure, like accelerometers or strain gauges. However, the setup time of these sensors and their restricted number and space coverage limit their monitoring capabilities. Video image-based sensing methods can overcome these shortcomings. With adequate image processing methods, motion signals are extracted from video image flows, which are then processed by system identification methods to estimate modal parameters. In this way, the pixels in selected regions of interest within the images act as a dense network of contactless sensors distributed over the whole structure. In this paper, the efficiency of this video-based approach is demonstrated with laboratory experiments on a cantilever beam, in particular, by evaluating its capability for detecting weak damages mimicked by slight mass modifications. To this end, the steerable filter-based method (ST), that recovers displacements from local phase, is first extended to overcome its motion limitation of one pixel size. Then, the performance of the improved motion extraction method is compared with two other well-established methods in the context of OMA, where natural frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes with high spatial resolution are estimated together with their uncertainty bounds using covariance-driven subspace identification. The compared methods are evaluated with the help of reference laser displacement measurements as well as a finite element model of the beam, revealing differences in the accuracy of the estimated mode shapes depending on the chosen method for motion extraction. Finally, aiming to investigate early structural damage detection, experiments are carried out under small structural changes and the results are compared to a reference state with the help of estimated uncertainties. Small but statistically significant changes in the modal parameters are detected, showing the potential of the vision based framework for SHM.