1.1   The purpose of this document is to assist potential users in understanding the issues related to the accuracy of non-contacting strain measurement systems and to provide a common framework for quantitative comparison of optical systems. The output from a non-contacting optical strain and deformation measurement system is generally divided into optical data and image analysis data. Optical data contains information related to specimen strains and the image analysis process converts the encoded optical information into strain data. The enclosed document describes potential sources of error in the strain data and describes general methods for quantifying the error and estimating the accuracy of the measurements when applying non-contacting methods to the study of events for which the optical integration time is much smaller than the inverse of the maximum temporal frequency in the encoded data (that is, events that can be regarded as static during the integration time). A brief application of the approach, along with specific examples defining the various terms, is given in the Appendix.