New measurement method of Poisson's ratio of PVA hydrogels using an optical flow analysis for a digital imaging system

In this paper, we propose a method to observe deformation, to measure strain and to calculate Poisson's ratio of a soft material such as a polyvinyl alcohol hydrogel by means of an optical flow analysis during a tensile test. Compared to the conventional digital image correlation method of which the basic assumption is that the local target region in an image is under linear deformation, an optical flow method can measure local deformation up to the pixel level of the image. In addition, sub-pixel measurements are possible by means of bi-cubic interpolation of each flow vector. To guarantee the accuracy of the optical flow vectors, the scale-invariant feature transform was used. Random sample consensus (RANSAC) for eliminating noisy features and then obtaining a more accurate result was applied. The mean value of Poisson's ratio is 0.4498 and the standard deviation comes to 0.0305. This optical flow method can also be applied to calculate Poisson's ratio of other soft materials.