LAUSR

Abstract The extraction of useful information and removal of redundant noise from data has become a major research topic in recent years. Data compression is necessary for all kinds of analysis, and the demand for efficient compression techniques has gained much attention. Digital image correlation is a camera-based measuring system, which has been widely applied in strain analysis because of the convenience of measuring displacement fields by simply selecting a region of interest. Currently, there is interest in applying such methods to engineering structures in dynamics. However, one of the major issues related to the integration of camera-based systems with dynamic measurement is the generation of huge amounts of data, typically extending to many thousands of data points, because of the requirements of high sampling rate, spatial resolution, and long duration of recording. In this paper a new algorithm is presented that addresses the need for efficiency in full-field data processing. By making use of the data itself and combining the concept of sparse representation with Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation, the number of basis function used to represent the data can be reduced and a concise decomposition established. In both simulated and experimental cases, the compression ratios for data size and number of signals used in operational modal analysis are substantially diminished, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. A reduced number of new basis functions is determined for the representation of data under the condition that the reconstructed displacement map reproduces the raw measured data to within a chosen threshold on the coefficient of correlation.