Improved digital image correlation for in-plane displacement measurement

Electronic speckle photography (ESP) for in-plane displacement (IPD) and deformation measurements is well known with its more modern form, digital image correlation (DIC). Two speckle images of an optically rough surface before and after deformation, called reference and test images, are recorded and processed for IPD or deformation measurement of the test image with respect to the reference image. The reliability of ESP in measurements depends strongly on the postprocessing of the two images by DIC, which we have referred to as conventional DIC. In this paper, we are proposing a small but useful modification in the existing DIC methods by introducing some additional steps, which drastically improves the results obtained with the existing techniques. The modification to the conventional DIC method has been referred to as modified DIC. Computer-simulated and experimental results have been presented to validate the superiority of modified DIC over conventional DIC methods.