In the deformation measurement of high-temperature structures, image degradation caused by thermal radiation and random errors introduced by heat haze restrict the accuracy and effectiveness of deformation measurement. The purpose of this study is to suppress thermal radiation and heat haze using fusion-restoration image processing methods, thereby improving the accuracy and effectiveness of Digital Image Correlation (DIC) in the measurement of high-temperature deformation. For image degradation caused by thermal radiation, based on the image layered representation, the image is decomposed into positive and negative channels for parallel processing, and then optimized for quality by multi-exposure image fusion. To counteract the high-frequency, random errors introduced by heat haze, we adopt the Feature Similarity Index (FSIM) as the objective function to guide the iterative optimization of model parameters, and the grayscale average algorithm is applied to equalize anomalous gray values, thereby reducing measurement error. The proposed multi-exposure image fusion algorithm effectively suppresses image degradation caused by complex illumination conditions, boosting the effective computation area from 26 % to 50 % for under-exposed images and from 32 % to 40 % for over-exposed images without degrading measurement accuracy in the experiment. Meanwhile, the image restoration combined with the grayscale average algorithm reduces static thermal deformation measurement errors. The error in \ (ₗₗ\) is reduced by 85. 3%, while the errors in \ (ₘₘ\) and \ (ₗₘ\) are reduced by 36. 0% and 36. 4%, respectively. We present image processing methods to suppress the interference of thermal radiation and heat haze in high-temperature deformation measurement using DIC. The experimental results verify that the proposed method can effectively improve image quality, reduce deformation measurement errors, and has potential application value in thermal deformation measurement.
Guan et al. (2026) studied this question.