The stress intensity factor (SIF) is a critical parameter associated with the fracture behaviour of materials. In this paper, we select the displacement function around a crack tip as the shape function of the digital image correlation (DIC), which makes it possible to directly calculate the SIF by the correlation scheme. Moreover, we use a non-rectangular subset, which can reduce the influence of plastic deformation and crack width on the DIC measurement accuracy. We measured the SIF of a mode I crack in a super-hard aluminium alloy specimen to verify the performance of the proposed method. Our experimental results show that a DIC with a specific shape function can be used to accurately and efficiently calculate the SIF. Furthermore, we also present a practical application of our proposed method for determining the SIF, crack propagation angle and crack tip displacement.