Holographic particle image velocimetry: a comparison of digital shearing and 3D correlation analysis methods

Abstract

In the past, the use of optical and digital three-dimensional correlation methods have been demonstrated to extract velocity data from the complex amplitude distribution of particle images in holographic particle image velocimetry (HPIV). Recently we have proposed a digital shearing method to extract three-component particle displacement data throughout a complete image field. In contrast to full three-dimensional correlation, it has been shown that all three components of particle image displacement can be retrieved using just four two-dimensional fast Fourier transform (FFT) operations and appropriate co-ordinate transformations. In this paper we describe three-dimensional correlation and digital shearing methods and compare their performance in terms of computational efficiency and measurement accuracy. The simulated results show that the digital shearing method has comparable accuracy to three-dimensional correlation but is significantly faster.