Improvement of digital photoelasticity based on camera response function

Studies on photoelasticity have been conducted by many researchers in recent years, and many equations for photoelastic analysis based on digital images were proposed. While these equations were all presented by the light intensity emitted from the analyzer, pixel values of the digital image were actually used in the real calculations. In this paper, a proposal of using relative light intensity obtained by the camera response function to replace the pixel value for photoelastic analysis was investigated. Generation of isochromatic images based on relative light intensity and pixel value were compared to evaluate the effectiveness of the new approach. The results showed that when relative light intensity was used, the quality of an isochromatic image can be greatly improved both visually and quantitatively. We believe that the technique proposed in this paper can also be used to improve the performance for the other types of photoelastic analysis using digital images.