In order to reliably describe the response of engineering structures under prescribed workloads, it is necessary to know the behavior of the applied material. For the classical engineering materials, it is extremely important to have an insight into their elastoplastic behavior since it can be described by different material models. The elastoplastic behavior of the material is determined by conducting mechanical tests with different loading regimes. From the experimental investigation the material response is identified (ie. displacement and force measurements). The displacement measurement methods can generally be divided into contact and contactless methods. The advantage of contactless methods is the ability to measure the displacement fields over the entire measuring area. Digital Image Correlation (DIC) method is an optical, contactless displacement and deformation full-field measuring method. In this work, a global approach of the DIC method was used. In the proposed method the measuring area is discretized by a finite element mesh. The results obtained by this approach (ie. the measured displacement fields in the nodes of the finite element network) make a simple straightforward connection toward numerical simulations. The material parameters of the constituent laws can be identified from the recorded digital images (i.e. measured displacement fields) using the inverse methods. Inverse problems can be solved using direct or iterative methods. Since elastoplastic material laws are complex, they are most commonly solved by iterative methods. Hence, in this work an iterative Finite Element Model Updating (FEMU) method was used. The FEMU method iteratively minimizes two cost functions related to the measured quantities during the experimental test. The first functional that need to be satisfied is related to the difference between the measured and calculated displacement fields. The displacement fields are measured by the global DIC method and the calculated displacement fields are obtained by numerical simulations. The second cost function to be minimized takes into consideration the difference between the measured forces and the sum of reactive forces from the numerical model. The FEMU algorithm enables the identification of the material behavior in a more reliably way, since the measured localization effects on test sample are taken into account. In this work, uniaxial monotonic and cyclic tests were performed on test specimens made of Hardox 450. Digital images were recorded during the mechanical experiments. From latter series of images, the displacement fields were measured via global DIC method. Furthermore, the FEMU identification routine is developed within this master thesis. The proposed algorithm was used to determine elastoplastic material parameters of Hardox 450. Since monotonic and cyclic tests have been performed, isotropic, kinematic and mixed hardening parameters have been identified. The optimized material parameters were assigned to the material model of the tensile rod. For the purpose of further optimization of the tensile rod, the proposed numerical analysis was conducted with prescribed operating conditions.