Integrated Digital Image Correlation considering gray level and blur variations: Application to distortion measurements of IR camera

The acquisition of images with different modalities may involve different alterations with respect to an ideal model. Inhomogeneous brightness and contrast, blur due to non-ideal focusing, distortions are common. It is proposed herein to account for such effects for instance by registering a calibration target image with an actual optical image to measure lens distortions. An Integrated Digital Image Correlation (I-DIC) algorithm is proposed to account for the above artifacts and the algorithm is detailed. The resolution and uncertainty of the technique are first investigated on synthetic images, and then applied to the measurement of distortions for infrared (IR) images. The procedure is shown to reduce drastically the residual level assessing the validity of the image formation model, but more importantly allowing for a much improved registration of images.