A common problem during study of, for instance, tensile tests with interferometers is that the sample moves too much so that the speckles decorrelate and no phase information is obtained. Two ways to overcome this problem are compared: a combination of speckle interferometry and speckle correlation and a method in which the reference image is updated during the experiment. The comparison shows that both techniques can be used to measure the deformation of an object even if it is exposed to rigid body motions. Both techniques are applied to measurements of microscale deformation fields of an adhesive joint in a carbon-fiber epoxy composite.

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The use of complex amplitude correlation to compensate for large in-plane motion in digital speckle pattern interferometry is investigated. The result is compared with experiments where digital speckle photography (DSP) is used for compensation. An advantage of using complex amplitude correlation instead of intensity correlation (as in DSP) is that the phase change describing the deformation is retrieved directly from the correlation peak, and there is no need to compensate for the large movement and then use the interferometric algorithms. A discovered drawback of this method is that the correlation values drop quickly if a phase gradient larger than pi is present in the subimages used for cross correlation. This means that, for the complex amplitude correlation to be used, the size of the subimages must be well chosen or a third parämeter in the cross-correlation algorithm that compensates for the phase variation is needed. Correlation values and wrapped phase maps from the two techniques (intensity and complex amplitude correlation) are presented.

We investigate experimentally the optimal rate at which the reference speckle pattern should be updated when dynamic speckle interferometry is used to measure transient in-plane displacement fields. Images are captured with a high-speed camera and phase shifting and phase unwrapping are done temporally. For a wide range of in-plane velocities, up to a maximum of 40% of the Nyquist limit, the random errors in the calculated displacement field are minimized by updating the reference speckle pattern after a speckle displacement of 1/10 of the pixel spacing. The technique is applied to measurements of microscale deformation fields within an adhesive joint in a carbon-fiber epoxy composite.