A Stochastic Filtering Technique for Fluid Flow Velocity Fields Tracking

In this paper, we present a method for the temporal tracking of fluid flow velocity fields. The technique we propose is formalized within a sequential Bayesian filtering framework. The filtering model combines an Itô diffusion process coming from a stochastic formulation of the vorticity-velocity form of the Navier-Stokes equation and discrete measurements extracted from the image sequence. In order to handle a state space of reasonable dimension, the motion field is represented as a combination of adapted basis functions, derived from a discretization of the vorticity map of the fluid flow velocity field. The resulting nonlinear filtering problem is solved with the particle filter algorithm in continuous time. An adaptive dimensional reduction method is applied to the filtering technique, relying on dynamical systems theory. The efficiency of the tracking method is demonstrated on synthetic and real-world sequences.     

A Low Dimensional Fluid Motion Estimator

In this paper we propose a new motion estimator for image sequences depicting fluid flows. The proposed estimator is based on the Helmholtz decomposition of vector fields. This decomposition consists in representing the velocity field as a sum of a divergence free component and a vorticity free component. The objective is to provide a low-dimensional parametric representation of optical flows by depicting them as deformations generated by a reduced number of vortex and source particles. Both components are approximated using a discretization of the vorticity and divergence maps through regularized Dirac measures. The resulting so called irrotational and solenoidal fields consist of linear combinations of basis functions obtained through a convolution product of the Green kernel gradient and the vorticity map or the divergence map respectively. The coefficient values and the basis function parameters are obtained by minimization of a functional relying on an integrated version of mass conservation principle of fluid mechanics. Results are provided on synthetic examples and real world sequences.     

Field of Particle Filters for Image Inpainting

We present a novel algorithm for solving the image inpainting problem based on a field of locally interacting particle filters. Image inpainting, also known as image completion, is concerned with the problem of filling image regions with new visually plausible data. In order to avoid the difficulty of solving the problem globally for the region to be inpainted, we introduce a field of local particle filters. The states of the particle filters are image patches. Global consistency is enforced by a Markov random field image model which connects neighbouring particle filters. The benefit of using locally interacting particle filters is that several competing hypotheses on inpainting solutions are kept active, allowing the method to provide globally consistent solutions on problems where other local methods may fail. We provide examples of applications of the developed method.