The Effect of Bit Depth on High-Temperature Digital Image Correlation Measurements

Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is a camera-based method of measuring displacement and strain. High-temperature DIC is challenging due to light emitted from the sample which can saturate the image. This effect can be mitigated using optical bandpass filters, but the maximum sample temperature range of DIC remains dependent on the camera and camera settings. Among camera settings, bit depth, also referred to as color depth or number of bits, has received insufficient attention in high-temperature DIC literature. In this work, the effect of bit depth on DIC measurements is investigated both analytically and experimentally. It is shown that if image noise is sufficiently low, then increasing bit depth reduces DIC random error. A new metric, the effective number of bits, is presented to determine the appropriate number of bits for DIC images. Using increased bit depth, reduced exposure time, and low-noise images, the maximum sample temperature for DIC measurements was shown to increase without negatively impacting random error.