Dynamic testing of a laboratory model via vision-based sensing

•A 2D vision-based non-contact displacement sensor system is constructed.•The space coordinates of targets are acquired by DLT and registration approaches.•The system performances are quite stable in different camera orientations.•The system flexibility is improved.

In the class of not-contact sensors, the techniques of vision-based displacement estimation enable one to gather dense global measurements of static deformation as well as of dynamic response. They are becoming more and more available thanks to the ongoing technology developments. In this work, a vision system, which takes advantage of fast-developing digital image processing and computer vision technologies and provides high sample rate, is implemented to monitor the 2D plane vibrations of a reduced scale frame mounted on a shaking table as available in a laboratory. The physical meanings of the camera parameters, the trade-off between the system resolution and the field-of-view, and the upper limitation of marker density are discussed. The scale factor approach, which is widely used to convert the image coordinates measured by a vision system in the unit of pixels into space coordinates, causes a poor repeatability of the experiment, an unstable experiment precision, and therefore a global poor flexibility. To overcome these problems, two calibrations approaches are introduced: registration and direct linear transformation. Based on the constructed vision-based displacement measurement system, several experiments are carried out to monitor the motion of a scale-reduced model on which dense markers are glued. The experiment results show that the proposed system can capture and successfully measure the motion of the laboratory model within the required frequency band.