Deep Learning Based Method for Dynamic Tracking of Bubbles in Microfluidic Gas-Driven Water Experiments

Abstract

Using microfluidic chips for gas displacement experiments is an important approach for studying CO2 displacement mechanisms and gas-liquid exchange processes. Analyzing the micro-scale distribution of gas and water during gas displacement enables the optimization of injection strategies, offering valuable guidance for enhancing oil and gas recovery rates. Traditional image processing techniques often face challenges in effectively handle the complex gas-liquid flow dynamics and irregular bubble shapes encountered in gas displacement experiments. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a gas bubble detection and tracking method for gas-driven water microfluidic experiments based on domain adaptation in deep learning and improved YOLOv8. Using the CycleGAN style transfer network to generate numerous simulated bubble training samples significantly reduces the manual labeling workload for bubbles. Additionally, the SE attention mechanism is integrated into the YOLOv8 backbone network to enhance the feature extraction capability of bubbles, and the Fast-PConv Head structure is incorporated into the detection head to enhance detection efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that using just 20 annotated experimental images, the bubble detection accuracy of the proposed method can reach 94%. Lastly, DeepSORT is employed to track bubbles and visualize the dynamic trends of bubble changes in the form of visual charts. The deep learning approach proposed in this paper provides a new perspective for intelligent analysis of bubbles in microfluidic chip experiments, and future work aiming to its application to the complex multiphase flow field in porous media.