Sub-pixel displacement measurement based on the combination of a gray wolf optimizer and gradient algorithm

The digital speckle correlation method (DSCM) aims to measure the displacement of the interesting points by matching the subset around the same point between the undeformed image and the deformed image. It is an effective and powerful optical metrology method for deformation measurement. Considering that the gray wolf optimizer (GWO) is one of the most popular metaheuristic algorithms to calculate the unknown search spaces in the field of optical engineering, a sub-pixel displacement measurement technique based on the GWO and gradient algorithm is proposed. First, the zero-mean normalized cross correlation function is applied to analyze the correlation between the reference image and deformed image subsets. Second, by exploiting the global searching ability of the GWO algorithm, the initial integer pixel value is obtained and further viewed as the initialization displacement. Finally, the final sub-pixel displacement is generated by using a Barron gradient algorithm. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods on synthetic speckle images, the proposed method can effectively measure the displacement and deformation of rigid bodies. Furthermore, the experiments on the real images demonstrate the effectiveness of our presented framework.