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Abstract

Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is an optical and numerical method capable of accurately providing full-field, two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) surface displacements and strains. 3-D DIC is typically done using two cameras that view the measured object from differing oblique directions. The measured images are independent and must be spatially connected using a detailed calibration procedure. This places a large demand on the practitioner, the optical equipment and the computational method. A novel approach is presented here where a single color-camera is used in place of multiple monochrome cameras. The color-camera measures three independent Red-Green-Blue (RGB) color-coded images. This feature greatly reduces the scale of the required system calibrations and spatial computations because the color images are physically aligned on the camera sensor. The in-plane surface displacements are obtained by performing traditional 2-D DIC in a single color. The out-of-plane information is obtained by a second 2-D DIC analysis and triangulation using oblique illumination from a differently colored light source. Further, the camera perspective errors associated with out-of-plane displacements can independently be measured during this second DIC analysis of the oblique illumination pattern. The 3-D Digital Image Correlation is completed by combining the 2-D correlations for each color. The design and creation of an example apparatus is described here. Experimental results show that the single-camera method can measure 3-D displacements with to within 1% error, with precision of the in-plane and out-of-plane measurements being consistently less than 0.04 and 0.12 pixels, respectively.