Use of rigid-body motion for the investigation and estimation of the measurement errors related to digital image correlation technique

The aim of this work is to investigate the sources of errors related to digital image correlation (DIC) technique applied to strain measurements. The knowledge of such information is important before the measured kinematic fields can be exploited. After recalling the principle of DIC, some sources of errors related to this technique are listed. Both numerical and experimental tests, based on rigid-body motion, are proposed. These tests are simple and easy-to-implement. They permit to quickly assess the errors related to lighting, the optical lens (distortion), the CCD sensor, the out-of-plane displacement, the speckle pattern, the grid pitch, the size of the subset and the correlation algorithm. The errors sources that cannot be uncoupled were estimated by amplifying their contribution to the global error. The obtained results permit to address a classification of the error related to the used equipment. The paper ends by some suggestions proposed in order to minimize the errors. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.