A Fluid Motion Estimator for Schlieren Imaging Velocimetry

E. ARNAUD; E. MEMIN; R. SOSA; G. ARTANA

Graz, Austria

Congreso; 9th European Conference on Computer Vision; 2006

Graz University of Technology and University of Ljubljana

In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the motion of fluid flows that are visualized through a Schlieren system. Such a system is well known in °uid mechanics as it enables the visualization of unseeded fows. As the resulting images exhibit very low photometriccontrasts, classical motion estimation methods based on the brightness consistency assumption (correlation-based approaches, optical flow methods) are completely ineficient. This work aims at proposing a sound energy based estimator dedicated to these particular images. The energy function to be minimized is composed of (a) a novel data term describing  the fact that the observed luminance is linked to the gradient of the fluid density and (b) a speci¯c div curl regularization term. The relevance of our estimator is demonstrated on real-world sequences.