Performance evaluation of strain field measurement by digital image correlation using HEVC compressed ultra-high speed video sequences

The tremendous growth of imaging applications for mechanical engineering increases the amount of image and video data used to capture the microstructural characteristics or mechanical behavior of materials as a sequence of frames. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the new state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard to compress efficiently video sequences of materials under tensile testing captured with ultra-high speed camera. Different lossless and lossy coding modes are considered and the compression ratios as well as reconstructed video quality are studied. Preliminary simulation results show that HEVC offers high coding efficiency and excellent reconstructed video quality expressed in terms of PSNR as well as SSIM while preserving data accuracy for the prediction of material tensile behavior at high loading speed. We also propose a discussion on the consequences of HEVC compression on image content analysis. We show that material strain's measurements are not affected by HEVC compression in a significant way.