Optik 126 (2015) 37133716

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Optik
journal homepage: www.elsevier.de/ijleo

A comparative study of random speckle pattern simulation models in

digital image correlation
Guoqing Gu
Civil Engineering Department, Yancheng Institute of Technology, Yancheng, Jiangsu 224051, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Digital image correlation (DIC) is a non-contact and powerful optical metrology for full-eld measure-
Received 20 September 2014 ment of deformation and strain elds. In DIC, computer-generated random speckle patterns are usually
Accepted 31 August 2015 used for the performance verication of DIC due to the advantages of well-controlled, high sensibility
and high correlation coefcient. Comparative studies of the different random speckle patterns simulation
Keywords: models are presented. The verication of the simulation models is investigated through a DIC method for
Digital image correlation (DIC)
determination of in-plane translation and rotation, respectively. Finally, the deformation measurement
Computer-generated speckle patterns
relative errors corresponding to different simulation models are shown.
In-plane translation and rotation
Measurement relative error 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction calculation of the FresnelKirchhoff diffraction integral in statisti-

In modern optical metrology, digital image correlation (DIC) is
a popular, effective and practical technique for full-eld deforma-
tion and strain measurement, which is commonly accepted and
widely used in the eld of experimental mechanics and other sci-
entic elds [13]. DIC uses digital image processing to resolve
displacement and strain elds. A signicant advantage of DIC is that
it can treat those with the natural texture surface or pre-painted
the random speckle structures as the research object. They have
been used as the carrier of surface deformation information in two-
dimensional DIC. Due to that, computer-simulated random speckle
patterns or articial random speckle structures are always applied
for the practical implementation of the DIC. Computer-generated
random speckle patterns can provide well-controlled image fea-
tures and deformation information so as to verify the performance
of DIC effectively.
There are some ways how to simulate random speckle patterns
numerically. For example, Zhou et al. [4] have proposed an easy
model to simulate the random speckle patterns, which is based on
the assumption of the sum of the individual Gaussian speckles, and
rstly veried the performance of DIC using the simulated speckle
images. From then on, this simulated model has been increas-
ingly used to generate the numerical speckle images in a large
quantity of literatures related to DIC. Moreover, another widely
used way for the simulation of speckle patterns is based on the
Tel.: +86 13815579084.
E-mail address: gqgu@ycit.edu.cn
cal optics [5]. For instance, in 1990, Leushacke et al. [6] analyzed the
three-dimensional correlation coefcient of speckle intensity for
rectangular and circular diffuse apertures in theory. In 2009, Hamed
[7] investigated the formation of numerical speckle patterns by cir-
cular diffuse apertures with different amplitude variation. Recently,
Hamarov [8] has numerically simulated the origin and propaga-
tion of speckle eld, and has applied speckle correlation method to
verify the performance of the simulated speckle images. However,
to our knowledge, quantitative evaluation of the above-mentioned
simulation models, which are applied to generate the numerical
speckle patterns, has yet to be reported. A number of experimental
results show that the displacement measurement accuracy of DIC is
closely related to the quality of the random speckle patterns [911].
It is of vital importance that how to properly select the numer-
ical random speckle images. Therefore, it is worthy to compare
and evaluate the performance of the aforementioned simulation
models.
In this paper, we fabricate the numerical random speckle pat-
terns using the above-mentioned simulation models, respectively.
Then, two numerical experiments are implemented to validate
the robustness, accuracy and efciency of the different simulation
models.
2. Principle of digital image correlation
In this section, the theory of DIC is discussed in brief. DIC uses
digital image processing to resolve displacement and deformation
gradient elds. The basic principle of the standard subset-based
DIC is shown in Fig. 1, which is to match the same physical points

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2015.08.271
0030-4026/ 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
3714 G. Gu / Optik 126 (2015) 37133716

3.2. Simulation model 2

As we all know, a three-dimensional speckle eld can be pro-

Fig. 1. Schematic of relation of pixel point in reference (or undeformed) and target
(or deformed) subsets.
imaged in the reference image and the deformed image. Towards
this, a square subset of N N pixels (or the so-called regions of
interest-ROI) surrounding the tested physical point in the initial
image is selected and used to nd its corresponding location in
the deformed image by dening the maximum value of the cal-
culated correlation coefcient. The vector between the reference
subset center and the target subset center is the in-plane displace-
ment vector at the interested point P(x, y). A correlation coefcient
distribution is acquired by moving the reference subset through the
searching subset continuously and calculating the correlation coef-
cient at each location. In practical situations, the zero-normalized
cross-correlation criterion [12], which is insensitive to the scale and
offset of illumination lighting uctuations, is dened below as:
n
[f (xi , yi ) fm ] [g(xi , yi ) gm ]
C(u.v) =  i=1
 2 ,
n 
n
(x , yi ) fm ]
2
g(xi , yi ) gm
i=1 [f i i=1
where f(xi , yi ) and g(xi , yi ) are the intensity values at (xi , yi ) in
 
the reference subset and (xi , yi ) in the target subset, respectively;
u, v are the displacements in the x and y directions, respectively;
 
and u = xi xi , v = yi yi , fm and gm are the mean intensity values
of the reference and target subset; n denotes the number of pixels
contained in the reference subset.
duced when an optically rough surface is illuminated by coherent
laser light [13] and the origin and propagation of speckle eld obey
the law of statistical optics. For this reason, a computer-generated
speckle pattern method is put forward based on the calculation
of the FresnelKirchhoff diffraction integral. We fabricate numeri-
cal speckle patterns from randomly distributed object considering
aperture modulation. Different types of apertures, such as rectan-
gular, circular or annular apertures and so on, used as a diffuser can
be investigated in the formation of random speckle patterns. Here,
we only take into account that the rectangular aperture is used as
the diffuser.
A rectangular illumination spot of sizes Dx and Dy in the part of
objects surface illuminated by a plane wave is assumed. Consider
bounded complex amplitude U0 (x, y) = Ur (x, y)exp( ikz) of incident
light, whose real part is dened as follows:
Dx Dy
1; |x| 2 and |y| 2
Ur = . (4)
0; |x| > Dx and |y| > Dy
2 2
For simplicity we can assume that the plane wave has unity
amplitude. Providing the zero-phase of the incident light in the
object plane (z = 0) and the unitary reection coefcient r(x, y) = 1,
the complex amplitude of the light after the reection from the
objects surface can be written as
(1)
U(x, y, (x, y)) = U0 (x, y)r(x, y) exp(ik(x, y)) = exp(ik(x, y)),
(5)
where k(x, y) is a random phase shift caused by random vari-
able surface roughness (x, y) and k is a wave number. Then the
FresnelKirchhoff diffraction integral for calculation of the com-
plex amplitude U(x , y ) of the light at the distance d from the object
plane (x, y) reduces into

3. Computer-generated speckle patterns

Dx /2
Dy/2
exp(ikd)
U(x , y ) =
id Dx /2 Dy/2
3.1. Simulation model 1
 
(x x) + (y y)2
2
In Ref. [4], Zhou et al. have proposed an easy and feasible model exp ik 2ik(x, y) dxdy. (6)
2(d + (x, y))
for the simulation of the random speckle pattern so as to verify
the performance of DIC based on computer numerical simulation.
Equation (6) is used for case of illumination of plane wave, then
Speckle patterns on the charge-coupled device (CCD) target are
the intensity of the simulated speckle patterns can be represented
assumed to be the sum of individual Gaussian speckle intensities:  2
  by means of relation I(x , y ) = U(x , y ) .


S r rk 2
I(r) = I0 exp , (2) 4. Generation of simulated speckle patterns
a2
k=1

According to the two computer simulation models presented

where S is the total number of computer-generated speckles, a is
above, the random speckle patterns can be generated by computer
speckle size, rk = (xk , yk )T are positions of each speckle with a ran-
program, respectively. In this paper, two types of random speckle
dom distribution, and I0 is the peak intensity of each speckle and
patterns are simulated having image dimensions 512 512 pix-
usually equals to one.
els. For model 1, the total number of computer-generated Gaussian
The speckle patterns are captured by the CCD target into discrete
speckles is 3000 and the Gaussian speckle size is 4 pixels; for model
pixels. Equation (2) can be transformed into the discretization form
2, we assume that Dx = Dy = 128 m, d = 20 cm, and  = 0.6328 m.
and written by as follows:
In order to simulate the Gaussian-correlated surface roughness

S
idx+dx
jdy+dy  2 2
 distribution, (x, y) can be replaced by the uniformly distributed
(x xk ) + (y yk )
I[i, j] = I0 exp dxdy, (3) random numbers, which are produced by means of the random
a2
k=1
idx jdy vector sampling method [14].
Fig. 2 shows the two types of computer-generated random
where dx and dy are the pixel size, and and are duty cycles. speckle patterns, I and II, which are obtained from the models 1 and
In general, dx, dy, and and are set to 1 for simplicity. 2, respectively, and their corresponding histograms. From Fig. 2, we
 G. Gu / Optik 126 (2015) 37133716
Fig. 2. Computer-generated random speckle patterns and their corresponding gray
histograms.
can nd that the change of speckle average-distribution density in
pattern II is much lower than the one in pattern I.
5. Verication using numerical simulation experiments
In order to investigate and compare the performance of the
aforementioned two computer-generated random speckle pat-
terns, verication of DIC code is applied in two well-controlled rigid
body in-plane deformation experiments, i.e., translation and rota-
tion. Firstly, two reference speckle images, shown in Fig. 2, are both
generated from numerical simulation by computer program, which
are 8-bite images with dimensions of 512 512 pixels. Afterwards,
numerically simulated deformed speckle patterns are generated by
applying the bicubic spline interpolation method [15] to the refer-
ence images for the following two sets of numerically simulated
experiments.
5.1. Experiment 1: rigid body in-plane translation
For two types of computer-generated random speckle patterns,
numerically shifted speckle images in the u direction with a trans-
lation increment of 0.5 pixels are, respectively, generated using
the bicubic spline interpolation method and sub-pixel translation
method. Cross-correlation of a reference speckle image and a sec-
ond image with a given rigid body in-plane translation yields the
deformation eld of the two types of the simulated speckle pat-
terns, respectively. The displacements between the undeformed
and deformed images are computed using DIC code with a subset
size of 41 41 pixels, which are shown in Fig. 3(a). The horizontal
axes are the preassigned translation values, while the vertical axes
are the results obtained from DIC. Obviously, the straight line rep-
resents a perfect correspondence between calculated values and
preassigned values. From Fig. 3(a), we can observe that the calcu-
lated results corresponding to two types of computer-generated
speckle patterns are both at the vicinity of the preassigned dis-
placements. In addition, the relative error between the measured
values and real values is also calculated, which is shown in Fig. 3(b).
From Fig. 3(b), we can nd that the relative error corresponding to
simulated speckle pattern I and II are mostly below 5% and the max-
imum relative error, corresponding to pattern I, is 5.2%. It can be
3715
Fig. 3. Rigid body translation measuring results.
concluded that these two types of simulated speckle patterns have
almost the same performance for the situation of homogeneous
deformation. Finally, in order to provide a visual understanding on
the type of deformation, a plot corresponding to the in-plane dis-
placement vector is shown in Fig. 3(c) in which the arrows indicate
the magnitude and direction of the in-plane displacement. It can
be easily seen from the displacement vector map that the in-plane
displacement is due to the in-plane translation of the simulated
speckle patterns.
5.2. Experiment 2: rigid body in-plane rotation
For the situation of heterogeneous deformation, the rigid body
in-plane rotation deformation has been taken into consideration.
Likewise, numerically counterclockwise-rotated speckle images
with a range from 0.5 to 3 and rotation increment of 0.5 between
successive images are also generated using the bicubic spline
interpolation method for two types of simulated speckle patterns,
respectively. For simplicity, the location of rotation center is just the
center point of simulated speckle images, i.e. (256, 256). Applica-
tion of DIC with a subset size of 41 41 pixels for the measurement
of in-plane deformation is then investigated for two numerically
simulated speckle patterns. According to our recent work [16], the
relationship between the rotation angle and the in-plane displace-
ment components is linear in theory. Thus, the rigid body in-plane
rotation angle can be obtained successfully based on the in-plane
displacement components elds. The calculation results of rotation
angle are shown in Fig. 4(a). The horizontal axes are the preassigned
rigid body in-plane rotation angles, while the vertical axes are the
results using DIC code. It is found that the straight line represents
a perfect correspondence between calculated values and preas-
signed values. In Fig. 4(a), we can observe the calculated results
related to speckle pattern II are much closer to the straight line
than those related to speckle pattern I. Fig. 4(b) illustrates the rela-
tive error between the measured values and the preassigned values
using the two types of computer generated speckle patterns. From
Fig. 4(b), we can see that: (1) the relative error corresponding to
3716 G. Gu / Optik 126 (2015) 37133716
Fig. 4. Rigid body rotation measuring results.
simulated speckle pattern I are mostly above 15% and the maximum
relative error corresponding to it is 23.9%; (2) the relative error
corresponding to simulated speckle pattern II are mostly below
5% and the maximum relative error corresponding to it is 5.5%;
(3) these two types of simulated speckle patterns have almost the
same performance for the situation of small rotation deformation.
The comparison of relative error between two types of simulated
speckle patterns indicates that the speckle pattern obtained from
the simulated model 2 can be more applicable to the large rota-
tion deformation than the simulated model 1. It is probably due
to the fact that the phenomenon of de-correlation corresponding
to pattern I increase gradually for the occasion of large angle rota-
tion deformation. Moreover, a plot corresponding to the in-plane
displacement vector is also shown in Fig. 4(c) from which it can be
easily seen that the in-plane displacement is due to a counterclock-
wise rotation of the simulated speckle patterns.
Finally, it is demonstrated from the numerical simulation exper-
iments that the numerical model 2 for the generation of simulated
speckle patterns is more feasible, robust and efcient, and has bet-
ter measurement accuracy and stability.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, two types of numerical simulation models for
the generation of the random speckle patterns are investigated
and compared by means of DIC. Two numerical simulation experi-
ments are also implemented to study and evaluate the performance
of the two models. The results from these experiments have
shown that the simulated model based on the calculation of the
Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction integral has a higher robustness, bet-
ter accuracy, and higher efciency for the measurement of the rigid
body in-plane rotation. For the situation of in-plane translation, two
simulation models have almost the same measurement accuracy.
While, for the situation of in-plane rotation, the simulation model
2 has a certain advantage, especially in large angle rotation. In addi-
tion, we can observe from the simulated experiments results that
good computer-simulated random speckle pattern in DIC should
possess a comparatively high speckle average-distribution density.
Therefore, these results give us some hints that how to select the
appropriate simulation model for the random speckle pattern gen-
eration.
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