Background <p>Determining the optimal number of classical biaxial tests and the selection of appropriate stress ratios for characterizing the complex behavior of coated woven fabrics is a challenge. Thus, the reliability of models calibrated using these homogeneous tests in predicting engineering structural performance may be limited.</p> Objective <p>A recently proposed experimental-numerical approach has been shown in a feasibility study to offer a new perspective for the characterization of nonlinear anisotropic thin materials&#xa0;(Makhool and&#xa0;Balzani Experimental Mech 64:353–375 2025). The goal here is not only to validate the robustness and efficiency of this much less expensive identification framework using real experimental data from a single experiment on coated woven fabrics, but also to demonstrate that the parameters obtained based thereon may even improve the accuracy of structural analysis.</p> Methods <p>On the basis of the Equilibrium Gap Method, provided that the material parameters are linear in the constitutive equations, a quadratic objective function is formulated, enabling a unique identification. Key of this framework are inhomogeneous full-field kinematics obtained from a single experimental setup designed to excite all essential deformation modes in the material model. Prior to incorporating the data into the discretized equilibrium equations, a pre-processing step is conducted, involving interpolation and extrapolation of the displacements on the scattered speckle pattern to map the values onto the computational grid.</p> Results <p>The analysis validates the efficiency of the framework for the identification of material parameters using a single inhomogeneous displacement field captured by Digital Image Correlation. Further, through examining a boundary value problem replicating a modified experimental setup, highly predictive numerical results that closely match experimental data are obtained incorporating the identified parameters. In contrast, the acquired response using parameters derived from a classical fitting method shows notable deviations. The difference becomes particularly significant for a complex roof structure investigated as an example engineering problem.</p> Conclusion <p>Based on real experiments, the experimental-numerical framework turns out to indeed allow for an efficient and unique identification of material parameters in hyperelastic models for coated woven fabrics. Since a variety of different stress-ratios are integrated at once in the experiment by considering inhomogeneous kinematics, also an improved accuracy in structural simulations is found.</p>