Study on subset size selection in digital image correlation for speckle patterns

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.