High-resolution light-field particle imaging velocimetry with color-and-depth encoded illumination

Abstract

Three-dimensional and three-components (3D-3C) measurement of flow velocity vector is important for the investigation of mechanism underlying flow structure. Light-field particle imaging velocimetry (LF-PIV) is a newly emerged technique for flow velocity measurement. However, LF-PIV suffers low axial resolution, prohibiting it for high fidelity imaging. To overcome this limitation, we proposed to employ color-depth-encoded illumination in light-field PIV (Code LF-PIV) to refine the particle's axial location with the color-depth information of the illumination beam. Code LF-PIV is the first system that integrates the snapshot acquisition of light-field acquisition and the high resolution capability of color coded illumination. Compared to conventional light-field PIV, Code LF-PIV can achieve much higher axial resolution due to the new illumination strategy. Compared to traditional coded illumination PIV, such as Rainbow PIV, Code LF-PIV has higher flexibility for variant imaging applications because of the elimination of customized diffractive optical element. We demonstrated the superiority of our system by imaging fixed particle, randomly distributed cavities inside crystal cube, and the square lid-driven cavity flow, where our Code LF system has increased the axial resolution by a factor of 23 when compared to the conventional LF system, and has achieved a comparable axial resolution as the depth super-resolved Rainbow PIV. Comprehensive evaluation of the imaging results demonstrated that Code LF-PIV combines the advantages of the high resolution of color-depth coded method with the convenient volumetric imaging of light-field camera, making Code LF-PIV a useful technique for high-resolution and large-scale flow measurement.