As a practical and effective tool for quantitative in-plane deformation measurement of a planar object surface, two-dimensional digital image correlation (2D DIC) is now widely accepted and commonly used in the field of experimental mechanics. It directly provides full-field displacements to sub-pixel accuracy and full-field strains by comparing the digital images of a test object surface acquired before and after deformation. In this review, methodologies of the 2D DIC technique for displacement field measurement and strain field estimation are systematically reviewed and discussed. Detailed analyses of the measurement accuracy considering the influences of both experimental conditions and algorithm details are provided. Measures for achieving high accuracy deformation measurement using the 2D DIC technique are also recommended. Since microscale and nanoscale deformation measurement can easily be realized by combining the 2D DIC technique with high-spatial-resolution microscopes, the 2D DIC technique should find more applications in broad areas.
Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is a flexible and effective technique to measure the displacements on specimen surfaces by matching the reference subsets in the undeformed image with the target subsets in the deformed image. With the existing DIC techniques, the user must rely on experience and intuition to manually define the size of the reference subset, which is found to be critical to the accuracy of measured displacements. In this paper, the problem of subset size selection in the DIC technique is investigated. Based on the Sum of Squared Differences (SSD) correlation criterion as well as the assumption that the gray intensity gradients of image noise are much lower than that of speckle image, a theoretical model of the displacement measurement accuracy of DIC is derived. The theoretical model indicates that the displacement measurement accuracy of DIC can be accurately predicted based on the variance of image noise and Sum of Square of Subset Intensity Gradients (SSSIG). The model further leads to a simple criterion for choosing an optimal subset size for the DIC analysis. Numerical experiments have been performed to validate the proposed concepts, and the calculated results show good agreements with the theoretical predictions.
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