Statistical analysis of the effect of intensity pattern noise on the displacement measurement precision of digital image correlation using self-correlated images

This paper discusses the effect of intensity pattern noise on the displacement measurement precision of digital image correlation (DIC). Through mathematical deduction, a formula is presented to estimate the displacement measurement error caused by intensity pattern noise. The resulting formula synthetically reflects the effects of the variance of noise, the intensity variance and the subset size on the displacement measurement precision. To verify the correctness of the resulting formula, two experiments are done. The first one is a real self-correlation experiment, and aims to analyze the effect of the subset size, while the second is a numerical self-correlation experiment, and is to analyze to the effect of the different noise levels. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions.