Comparison of Gaussian particle center estimators and the achievable measurement density for particle tracking velocimetry

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • M. Marxen - , University of Toronto (Author)
  • P. E. Sullivan - , University of Toronto (Author)
  • M. R. Loewen - , University of Toronto, University of Alberta (Author)
  • B. Jähne - , Heidelberg University  (Author)

Abstract

A series of numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the performance of two particle center estimation algorithms for Particle Tracking Velocimetry: a simple three-point Gaussian estimator and a least-square Gaussian. The smallest position error for images with reasonable noise levels was found to be approximately 0.03 pixels for both estimators using particles with diameters of 4 pixels. As both estimators performed equally well, use of the simple three-point Gaussian algorithm is recommended because it executes 100 times faster than the least-square algorithm. The maximum achievable measurement density and accuracy for the three-point Gaussian estimator were determined with a numerical simulation of an Oseen vortex. Uncertainty measures have been introduced to filter out unreliable displacement measurements, It was found that 4 to 5 velocity vectors could be obtained within a 32 × 32 pixel area with an average displacement error of 0.1 pixels. This doubles the spatial resolution of conventional cross-correlation based Particle Image Velocimetry at comparable accuracy.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)145-153
Number of pages9
JournalExperiments in fluids
Volume29
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2000
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-8870-0041/work/142251365