An Optical Flow Algorithm with Automatic Parameter Adjustment for Fluid Velocimetry

Particle image velocimetry is a standard non-intrusive experimental fluid mechanics technique that is used for determining fluid flow velocities quantitatively. The motion requires inferring the fluid motion from the motion of the seeded particles in a flow field. One of the methods to determine the motion of particles is optical flow, however, the available optical flow velocimetry algorithms contain user-tuned parameters leading to limited applicability on experimental data. An optical flow algorithm for fluid flow velocimetry with automatic parameter adjustment is developed and implemented as a processing module in an open-source GUI-based PIV package PIVlab.