Digital Image Correlation (DIC) has been proven to be a highly reliable framework for the full-field displacement and strain measurement of materials that undergo deformation when subjected to physical stresses. This paper presents a new method that extends the popular Newton-Raphson algorithm through the inclusion of spatial regularization in the minimization process used to obtain the motion data. The basic principle is that the motion data is calculated between corresponding blocks in the reference and deformed images using adaptively previously obtained motion estimates in the immediate vicinity of the respective location along with the local block-based image information. The results indicate significant accuracy improvements over the classic approach especially when the block sizes and strain calculation windows used for motion and strain estimation decrease in size
