Traditionally, FFT-based correlation techniques have been used to estimate the displacements of the particles in a digital PIV sequence. Recently, an optical flow estimation technique developed in computer vision has been successfully applied to DPIV. We discuss the DPIV-efficiency of another group of motion estimation approaches, the feature tracking techniques. Velocity fields obtained by several methods are compared for synthetic and real PIV sequences. It is concluded that feature tracking algorithms applied to DPIV are a good alternative to both the correlation and the optical flow algorithms.

The talk will be followed by online Internet demonstrations of point tracking and flow measurement algorithms.