A new and fast approach for DPIV using an incompressible affine flow model

Traditional digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) methods are previously based on area-correlation. Though proven to be very time-consuming and error prone, it has been widely adopted because it is conceptually simple, and easy to implement, and also because there are few alternatives. This paper provides a non-correlative, conceptually new, fast and efficient approach for DPIV which takes the nature of flow into consideration. An incompressible affine flow model (IAFM) is introduced to describe a flow that incorporates rational constraint directly into the computation. This IAFM, combining with a modified optical flow method – named total optical flow computation, provides a linear system solution to DPIV. Experimental results on real images demonstrate our method to be a very promising approach for DPIV. Received: 23 March 1998 / Accepted: 1 September 1999