Cross‐Correlation and Differential Technique Combination to Determine Displacement Fields

This study presents a method to measure the displacement fields on the surface of planar objects with sub‐pixel resolution, by combining image correlation with a differential technique. First, a coarse approximation of the pixel level displacement is obtained by cross‐correlation (CC). Two consecutive images, taken before and after the application of a given deformation, are recursively split in sub‐images, and the CC coefficient is used as the similarity measure. Secondly, a fine approximation is performed to assess the sub‐pixel displacements by means of an optical flow method based on a differential technique. To validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, several numerical tests were carried out on computer‐generated images. Moreover, real images from a static test were also processed for estimating the displacement resolution. The results were compared with those obtained by a commercial digital image correlation code. Both methods showed similar and reliable results according to the proposed tests.