A new method has been proposed to identify the natural frequencies and mode shapes of a bridge model, in which the digital image correlation (DIC) technique is used to track the dynamic displacement. A key issue in vibration-based damage detection for a bridge is to determine its modal parameters. It is difficult to use traditional acceleration sensors to obtain the accurate mode shapes of bridges as the sensors are only deployed on a few measurement points of the bridges. In this article, the DIC technique is used to capture the movement of the entire experimental bridge model. A steel truss is used as a bridge model and stimulated by a hammer; its dynamic displacement is recorded by using a digital video camera. The correlation analysis is used to track the displacement of the points of interest, and their displacement time histories are inputted into a modal analysis system; the natural frequencies and mode shapes of the bridge model were obtained by both operational modal analysis (OMA) and traditional experimental modal analysis (EMA) methods. (1) The DIC results are compared with those obtained by a traditional acceleration sensor-based method; the natural frequencies obtained by the two measurement methods are very close. (2) The DIC results are sensitive to the amplitude of the measured displacement and the shooting distance; small displacement amplitudes and long shooting distance may result in the low quality of the measured time-history curves, and low-frequency noise signals might be observed in their power spectral density (PSD) curves, while they can be easily solved by the filtering method in this article. (3) In addition, the first frequencies obtained by EMA and OMA are very close, which validates the applicability of the DIC measurement under ambient excitation. The research has illustrated the feasibility of the DIC method for obtaining the modal parameters of the bridges.
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