Stereo-DIC answers two questions at once: where a material point sits in the other camera (shape), and where it went (motion). Most tools answer both with independent subset correlations, which degrades exactly where experiments get interesting — steep gradients, discontinuities, decorrelating patterns. pyALDIC-3D runs temporal tracking through an Augmented-Lagrangian solver that couples the local IC-GN subproblems to a global FEM regularizer on an adaptive quadtree mesh, then triangulates to a metric, millimetre-native 3D surface. Calibration, crack handling, quality gating, 3D visualization and export are all in the box.
Key Features:
- Built-in stereo calibration from chessboards, ChArUco boards, circle grids, or a self-developed coded circular target, with reprojection QC, epipolar validation, bundle adjustment and an independent known-distance check that catches a wrong scale a reprojection RMS never will
- Imports calibrations from six external formats (MATLAB/OpenCV, MatchID, MMC, DICe, OpenCorr, OpenCV-YAML)
- Metric 3D surface: displacement needs no pixel-size calibration and carries no scale ambiguity
- Surface strain in three strain types (Green–Lagrange, infinitesimal, Euler–Almansi) and three coordinate systems, with a Numba-accelerated kernel
- Crack-aware throughout: the mesh is cut at a declared barrier, so the global step never bridges the two lips and the discontinuity survives
- Every shipped displacement is re-verified by an independent correlation check, not by reading the solver’s own convergence flag
- Desktop GUI (PySide6) localized in 8 languages
Scope: v1 supports a two-camera stereo rig. The data model is N-camera-ready, but N-camera (> 2) support is post-v1.