Measurement of soil particle movement in soil-structure interface test

A microscopic measurement system including device, algorithm and software was presented to observe and measure the particle movement in soils during soil-structure interface test. A zero-padding algorithm based on correlation-based image analysis theory with the accuracy of sub-pixel class was presented to determine the benchmarks in different digital images. A particle-tracking method as well as its program, which was fully computerized, was therefore developed to track soil particles with simultaneous measurement of their translation and rotation. The method was used to measure the soil particle movement in practical soil-structure interface test, which preliminarily confirmed that the method was valid in reasonable calculation of soil particle movement with the present microscopic measure system. The test results show that the significant particle motions concentrate in the soils near the structure, which will decrease obviously with the increase of the distance away from the structure.