Non-uniform illumination correction based on the retinex theory in digital image correlation measurement method

Digital image correlation is a well-known optical measurement method for full-field deformation and strain measurements. The quality of speckle images used in digital image correlation calculation can directly affect the measurement accuracy of digital image correlation. In most practical measurement circumstances, a uniform illumination environment is usually required to illuminate the detected object in order to capture speckle images upon different deformed states with uniform background intensity. However, the tested object becomes so large that the adopted light source cannot cover all the interested area with uniform illumination, and the speckle images acquired by CCD camera may have non-uniform background intensity distributions. In this paper, the influence of non-uniform illumination is first analyzed in detail by means of a comparison of experimental results of digital image correlation using speckle patterns with both uniform and non-uniform intensity distributions. Then, a new correctional method based on the combination of the basic retinex theory and the illumination formulae of a point light source is proposed. Finally, a real experiment with non-uniform illumination is implemented to verify the effectiveness of this method