We analyze representative ill-posed scenarios of tomographic PIV (particle image velocimetry) with a focus on conditions for unique volume reconstruction. Based on sparse random seedings of a region of interest with small particles, the corresponding systems of linear projection equations are probabilistically analyzed in order to determine: (i) the ability of unique reconstruction in terms of the imaging geometry and the critical sparsity parameter, and (ii) sharpness of the transition to non-unique reconstruction with ghost particles when choosing the sparsity parameter improperly. The sparsity parameter directly relates to the seeding density used for PIV in experimental fluids dynamics that is chosen empirically to date. Our results provide a basic mathematical characterization of the PIV volume reconstruction problem that is an essential prerequisite for any algorithm used to actually compute the reconstruction. Moreover, we connect the sparse volume function reconstruction problem from few tomographic projections to major developments in compressed sensing.

A variational approach is presented to the estimation of turbulent fluid flow from particle image sequences in experimental fluid mechanics. The approach comprises two coupled optimizations for adapting size and shape of a Gaussian correlation window at each location and for estimating the flow, respectively. The method copes with a wide range of particle densities and image noise levels without any data-specific parameter tuning. Based on a careful implementation of a multiscale nonlinear optimization technique, we demonstrate robustness of the solution over typical experimental scenarios and highest estimation accuracy for an international benchmark data set (PIV Challenge).

In the above paper (ibid., vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 3053-3065, Jun. 2012), several corrections requested by the authors were omitted. The IEEE regrets the error. On pp. 3058 and 3059, the algorithms were not indented corrected. They are corrected here.