Full-field speckle pattern image correlation with B-spline deformation function

A full-field speckle pattern image correlation method is presented that will determine directly the complete, two-dimensional deformation field during the image correlation process on digital images obtained using computer vision systems. In this work, a B-Spline function is used to represent the object deformation field throughout the entire image area. This is an improvement over subset-based image correlation methods by implicitly maintaining position and derivative continuity constraints among subsets up to a specified order. The control point variables within the B-Spline deformation function are optimized iteratively with the Levenberg-Marquardt method to achieve minimum disparity between the predicted and actual deformed images. Results have shown that the proposed method is computationally efficient, accurate and robust. The general framework of this method can be applied to n-dimensional image correlation systems that solve for multi-dimension vector fields.