Hybrid remapping particle field reconstruction method for synthetic aperture particle image velocimetry

The flow field velocity is an important parameter for completely characterizing the topologies of unsteady coherent flow structures. Synthetic aperture (SA)-based particle image velocimetry (SAPIV) has been used for three-dimensional flow measurements, owing to its wide range of acceptable tracer particle intensities and ability to view partially occluded fields. However, SAPIV typically suffers from poor reconstruction quality for nonuniformly illuminated particle volumes. In this paper, we propose a hybrid remapping particle field reconstruction method for SAPIV in a nonuniformly illuminated fluid flow. Both additive and minimum line-of-sight remapping are used to reconstruct the in-focus particles from the refocused image stacks. The structural similarity between the images projected by the reconstructed particle field and the images captured by the cameras are used to determine the reconstruction quality. This method was verified by both synthetic simulation and an experimental implementation. The performance of the proposed technique was compared with existing methods. The proposed method has the best reconstruction quality and computational speed among the considered methods.