Study of strength tests with computer vision techniques

Abstract

Knowing the strain response of materials in strength tests is one of the main issues in construction and engineering fields. In these tests, information about displacements and strains is usually carried out using physical devices attached to the material. In this paper, the suitability of Computer Vision techniques to analyse strength tests without interfering with the assay is discussed and a new technique is proposed. This technique measures displacements and deformations from a video sequence of the assay. With this purpose a Block-Matching Optical Flow algorithm is integrated with a calibration process to extract the vectorfield from the displacement in the material. To evaluate the proposed technique, a synthetic image set and a real sequence from a strength tests were analysed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.