Deformation measurement in the presence of discontinuities with digital image correlation: A review

Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is the heart of the remote deformation measurement techniques using images. It is applied to many different applications from medical imaging to engineering problems for measuring deformation remotely with high accuracy. Whereas it is highly successful in measuring continuous deformation, it has severe limitation of failure in measuring discontinuous deformation. Most of the real world problems contains discontinuous deformation and this makes the DIC application restricted to lab environment only. This study presents the first comprehensive literature review on remote deformation measurement in the presence of discontinuities using images. Different methodologies to overcome the limitation of DIC are analysed and categorized systematically. Finally, based on the reviewed literature, a broader outlook and possible future research directions in this area of research are presented.