Speckle pattern quality assessment for digital image correlation

•Techniques that evaluate physical changes in speckle patterns are described.•The measurement error is related to the uniqueness of a pattern.•Errors reduced with more speckles that covered more pixels.•Global parameters are not sufficient to assess speckle pattern properties.•A new morphological approach is presented and validated experimentally.

To perform digital image correlation (DIC), each image is divided into groups of pixels known as subsets or interrogation cells. Larger interrogation cells allow greater strain precision but reduce the spatial resolution of the data field. As such the spatial resolution and measurement precision of DIC are limited by the resolution of the image. In the paper the relationship between the size and density of speckles within a pattern is presented, identifying that the physical properties of a pattern have a large influence on the measurement precision which can be obtained. These physical properties are often overlooked by pattern assessment criteria which focus on the global image information content. To address this, a robust morphological methodology using edge detection is devised to evaluate the physical properties of different speckle patterns with image resolutions from 23 to 705 pixels/mm. Trends predicted from the pattern property analysis are assessed against simulated deformations identifying how small changes to the application method can result in large changes in measurement precision. An example of the methodology is included to demonstrate that the pattern properties derived from the analysis can be used to indicate pattern quality and hence minimise DIC measurement errors. Experiments are described that were conducted to validate the findings of morphological assessment and the error analysis.