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An accurate optical flow estimation of PIV using fluid velocity decomposition

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Abstract

In this study, we propose a novel optical flow formulation for estimating high-accuracy velocity fields from tracer particle image sequences. According to the Helmholtz velocity decomposition theorem, the proposed optical flow method decomposes the two-dimensional velocity field into four components: translation motion, linear distortion motion, shear distortion motion and rotation motion. In this context, regularization terms for different motion components are designed, which have a reasonable physical interpretation for the flow characteristics of the fluid. Subsequently, we design specific regularization parameters for the corresponding regularization terms according to the flow characteristics of the motion components. These regularization parameters can be adaptively adjusted with changes in the image space and velocity field. In addition, the data term of the optical flow formulation is based on the projected-motion equation derived from the continuity equation, which maintains the compressibility of the fluid in the two-dimensional plane. Velocity fields are estimated from synthetic tracer particle images and hypersonic experimental image sequences, and the velocity results are compared to those of an advanced cross-correlation-based PIV method and previous advanced optical flow methods. The results and comparisons indicate that the proposed method shows good performance and high measurement accuracy when acquiring compressible flow structures from fluid measurements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Jin Lu, Hua Yang & Zhouping Yin

  2. Hypervelocity Aerodynamics Institute, China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center, Mianyang, 621000, China

    Qinghu Zhang

Authors
  1. Jin Lu
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  2. Hua Yang
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  3. Qinghu Zhang
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  4. Zhouping Yin
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Correspondence to Hua Yang.

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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51875228), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2020YFA0405700), and the National Defense Science and Technology Innovation Special Zone Project (Grant No. 193-A14-202-01-23).

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Lu, J., Yang, H., Zhang, Q. et al. An accurate optical flow estimation of PIV using fluid velocity decomposition. Exp Fluids 62, 78 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-021-03176-w

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