Effect of the mesh size of the vector displacement field on the strain estimate in the digital image correlation method

The influence of the mesh size of the displacement vector field on the strain estimate in the digital image correlation method is considered. The reasons for the emergence and the magnitude of the strain estimate error in processing optical images of material surfaces with different textures are analyzed. The dependence of the mesh size for strain estimation on the magnitude of displacements and also on the presence and size of the discontinuity region in the strain field is studied. An adaptive algorithm for choosing the mesh size is proposed, which allows the strain calculation error to be reduced by a factor of 1.9 with simultaneous reduction of computational expenses by a factor of 2.1.