Augmented Lagrangian Digital Image Correlation

Digital image correlation (DIC) is a powerful experimental technique for measuring full-field displacement and strain. The basic idea of the method is to compare images of an object decorated with a speckle pattern before and after deformation, and thereby to compute the displacement and strain fields. Local subset DIC and finite element-based global DIC are two widely used image matching methods. However there are some drawbacks to these methods. In local subset DIC, the computed displacement field may not be compatible, and the deformation gradient may be noisy, especially when the subset size is small. Global DIC incorporates displacement compatibility, but can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a new method, the augmented-Lagrangian digital image correlation (ALDIC), that combines the advantages of both the local (fast) and global (compatible) methods. We demonstrate that ALDIC has higher accuracy and behaves more robustly compared to both local subset DIC and global DIC.