“…For the undeformed configuration and for each successive deformed state, a sequence of four synthetic fringe patterns are projected onto the sample whose surface is provided with a light speckle pattern to allow DIC-based matching of image-pairs (4 s acquisition time and ß3 min between subsequent loads). The two signals (fringe pattern and speckle texture) can then easily be separated in the frequency domain by Fourier Transform analysis [27]. However, in this work, we preferred to extract the speckle texture by averaging the four images [21] and to remove the speckle noise from the fringe data by fitting a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) to the data, since it represents an alternative and flexible tool that allows a better control on the fidelity of the final filtered data [25].…”