Abstract: The measuring equipment is used for the optical monitoring of cracks in mrial test pieces, which are loaded by a loading device. A television camera trained on the test piece is connected to a discriminator which converts the image points of the television image into binary pulses. The binary pulses of the television image are stored from time to time in a store. A comparator compares the contents of the store with the binary pulses of a consecutive television image and ascertains deviations between two consecutively-taken television images. The number of the non-coincident binary pulses of the compared television images is counted and indicated.