The HR-EBSD method can achieve a precision of ±10 in components of the displacement gradient tensors (i.e., variations in lattice strain and lattice rotation in radians) by measuring the shifts of zone axes within the pattern image with a resolution of ±0.05 pixels. It was limited to small strains and rotations (>1.5°) until Britton and Wilkinson and Maurice et al. raised the rotation limit to ~11° by using a re-mapping technique that recalculated the strain after transforming the patterns with a rotation matrix () calculated from the first cross-correlation iteration.
However, further lattice rotation, typically caused by severe plastic deformations, produced errors in the elastic strain calculations. To address this problem, Ruggles et al. improved the HR-EBSD precision, even at 12° of lattice rotation, using the inverse compositional Gauss–Newton-based (ICGN) method instead of cross-correlation. For simulated patterns, Vermeij and Hoefnagels also established a method that achieves a precision of ±10 in the displacement gradient components using a full-field integrated digital image correlation (IDIC) framework instead of dividing the EBSPs into small ROIs. Patterns in IDIC are distortion-corrected to negate the need for re-mapping up to ~14°. 
These measurements do not provide information about the hydrostatic or volumetric strains, because there is no change in the orientations of lattice planes (crystallographic directions), but only changes in the position and width of the Kikuchi bands.