Automatic Extraction of Particle Streaks for 3D Flow Measurement

Circular dynamic stereo has special advantages as it enables a 3-D measurement using a single TV camera and also enables a high accurate measurement without a cumbersome calibration. Annular particle streaks are recorded using this system and the size of annular streaks directly concerns to the depth from TV camera. That is, the size of annular streaks is inversely proportional to the depth from the TV camera and the depth can be measured automatically by image processing technique. Overlapped streaks can be processed also by our method. The flow measurement in a water tank is one of the applications of our system. Tracer particles are introduced into the water in a flow measurement. Since the tracer particles flow with water, three-dimensional velocity distributions in the water tank can be obtained by measuring the all movement of tracer particles. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our method.