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Abstract Characterizing materials under shock loading has been of interest in fields such as protective material development, biomechanics to study the injury mechanics and high-speed aerodynamic structures. However, shock loading of material is a very short duration phenomenon and it is extremely challenging to develop sensors for dynamic measurements under such loading conditions. Optical fiber sensors present the possibilities to allow high resolution measurement of displacement in such high strain rate loading conditions. This work studies the possibility of using a fiber-optic loop sensor (FOLS) based on the principle of power losses from the curved section for dynamic measurements under shock loading conditions. The displacement results obtained from the optical sensors are compared with the traditional strain gauge and digital image correlation (DIC) measurements. The result obtained by the FOLS closely matched the sensitivity and precision of the strain gauges and had higher precision than that of DIC.