Deep particle image velocimetry supervised learning under light conditions

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an important fluid visualization technology which extracts the velocity field from two successive particle images. Recently, some researchers have begun to use convolutional neural network (CNN) to tackle the PIV problem successfully. Some supervised learning methods make use of the PIV dataset with ground truth for network training. However, the existing dataset is composed of pairs of particle images under ideal light conditions and does not take into account the changes in actual experimental conditions. In this paper, we firstly generated a new and more challenging dataset called Light-PIV which fully simulates the change of the brightness of particle images in the real PIV experiment. Secondly, we present here a novel approach for fluid motion estimation which is based on an optical flow network LiteFlowNet. The proposed approach is verified by the application to a diversity of synthetic and experimental PIV images. We not only improve the structure, but also combine the traditional prior assumptions knowledge with the loss function to better guide the network training. The proposed approach is verified by the application to a diversity of synthetic and experimental PIV images. The experimental results show that our proposed method has advantages of high accuracy, obtaining detailed information and strong robustness in our PIV dataset compared with classical PIV methods such as HS optical flow and WIDIM, and even outperforms these existing approaches in some flow cases.