The SurView DIC Manual
Digital image correlation, measured carefully
What a DIC measurement actually is, what it can and cannot tell you, and how to run one that holds up. Written alongside SurView DIC, and grounded in it: every number and example here came from a real run, not an illustration invented for the page.
Version 2026.09.0 · 2026-09-03
Scope: two-dimensional DIC
This manual covers 2D DIC: one camera, a flat or nearly flat surface, and displacement measured in the plane of the image. That is what SurView measures today. Stereo ("3D") DIC, which adds out-of-plane movement using two calibrated cameras, and volumetric DVC, which correlates through the inside of a solid from tomography data, are both tracked on the roadmap and neither has a workflow in the application yet. Chapter 1 explains the difference, because it decides which questions a measurement can answer at all.
Who this is for
Someone technical who has never used digital image correlation, and someone who has used it for years and wants to know exactly what a number on screen is claiming. Neither is talked down to. DIC has a handful of ideas that are easy to state and easy to get quietly wrong, and this manual exists to make the wrong ways visible rather than to simplify the right ones away.
How it is organised
Five parts, in the order a measurement actually happens. Part I is the physics: what a correlation measures, why strain is a different kind of quantity from displacement, and the coordinate frame everything else sits in. Part II is running a real measurement: the region, the sequence, the reference, and what happens when a point cannot be measured. Part III is trust: the two numbers that say how far a result can be relied on, and how to read a coloured field without being misled by it. Part IV is what comes after one field: reading a whole test as a curve, and taking a result somewhere else. Part V is practice: speckling a specimen, choosing settings, lighting a rig.
Each chapter stands alone reasonably well, but the ideas build: Part I is worth reading in order even by someone who already knows DIC, because SurView's specific commitments (never write zero for something unmeasured, report two numbers where one would be dishonest) run through everything after it.
What is not here yet
This is a manual for the 2D planar case, which is what SurView measures today. Stereo and out-of-plane measurement, a calibration workflow, and reading a quantity along a line are real, working parts of the roadmap but not of the application yet, so they are not written up here either - a chapter describing a screen that does not exist would be worse than no chapter. See ROADMAP.md for where those stand. This manual will grow as they land.
How to cite this
The manual is documentation for the application rather than a separate work, so cite SurView itself, at the version you actually used. The repository carries a CITATION.cff that GitHub and reference managers read directly.
Sandquist, D. (2026). SurView DIC (version 2026.09.0)
[Computer software]. Katalyst Nord.
https://github.com/katalystnord/SurView
State the version, because what a result means depends on it: the recovery pass, reference updating and the reliability figures each arrived in a specific version, and a reader reproducing your measurement needs to know which behaviour they are matching.
Where to start
New to DIC: begin at Chapter 1 and read Part I straight through. Already know DIC and want SurView's specific behaviour: start at Part II. Only want to know whether to trust a result you already have: go straight to Part III.