Error estimations in digital image correlation technique

The reliability for each measurement technique depends on the knowledge of it's uncertainty and the sources of errors of the results. Among the different techniques for optical measurement techniques for full field analysis of displacements and strains, digital image correlation (DIC) has been proven to be very flexible, robust and easy to use, covering a wide range of different applications. Nevertheless the measurement results are influenced by statistical and systematical errors. We discuss a 3D digital image correlation system which provides online error information and the propagation of errors through the calculation chain to the resulting contours, displacement and strains. Performance tests for studying the impact of calibration errors on the resulting data are shown for static and dynamic applications.