Image-shearing camera for direct measurement of surface strains.

This paper describes a new image-shearing camera which focuses two laterally sheared images at the film plane. With coherent illumination, this camera becomes a shearing interferometer, which directly measures the derivatives of the surface displacements. This strain measuring tool enjoys several advantages over the conventional, holographic, and speckle interferometry, namely, (1) better fringe quality (than speckle interferometry); (2) does not require special vibration isolation; (3) very simple optical setup; (4) direct determination of strains; and (5) extended controllable range of sensitivity.