Strain field estimation based on digital image correlation and radial basis function

•A method combined RBF and least-squares algorithm was developed to obtain strain.•A novel method based on partial derivative of RBF was used to calculate strain.•A shape parameter selection method based on rate of convergence was introduced.

Two methods based on digital image correlation (DIC) and radial basis function (RBF) were proposed to obtain the accurate strain field in this paper. One is a combined method. RBF was applied to remove the noisy discrete displacement data first. After that, the strain was computed by a local least-squares algorithm. The other is a partial derivative of RBF (PD-RBF) based strain estimation method which integrated denoising with differential process. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed methods were verified through two numerical simulation experiments. A practical application on the normal strain measurement of an aluminum alloy beam under symmetric four-point bending via an outer loading frame was also presented. The measurement results are in good accordance with the data obtained by strain gauges. Furthermore, a shape parameter selection method based on rate of convergence was suggested. The new method simplifies the choice of the good shape parameter.