Spatiotemporal Image Analysis for Fluid Flow Measurements

In this chapter, a framework will be presented for measuring and modeling transport processes using novel visualization techniques and extended optical flow techniques for digital image sequence analysis. In this way, parameters besides the 2-D xy velocity components can be extracted concurrently from the acquired 2-D image sequences, such as wall shear rates and momentum transport close to boundaries, diffusion coefficients, and depth z in addition to the z velocity components. Depending on the application, particularly the temporal regularization can be enhanced, leading to stabilization of results and reduction of spatial regularization. This is frequently of high importance for flows close to boundaries. Results from applications will be presented from the fields of environmental and life sciences as well as from engineering.