Measurement of transient deformation by color encoding.

We present a method based on color encoding for measurement of transient 3D deformation in diffuse objects. The object is illuminated by structured light that consists of a fringe pattern with cyan fringes embedded in a white background. Color images are registered and information on each color channel is then separated. Surface features appear on the blue channel while fringes on the red channel. The in-plane components of displacement are calculated via digital correlation of the texture images. Likewise, the resulting fringes serve for the measuring of the out-of-plane component. As crossing of information between signals is avoided, the accuracy of the method is high. This is confirmed by a series of displacement measurements of an aluminum plate.