Single droplet tracking in jet flow

Abstract

Fluid systems such as the multiphase flow and the jet flow usually involve droplets and/or bubbles whose morphological properties can provide important clues about the underlying phenomena. In this paper, we develop a new visual tracking method to track the evolution of single droplets in the jet flow. Shape and motion features of the detected droplets are fused and Bhattacharyya distance is employed to find the closest droplet among possible candidates in consecutive frames. Shapes of the droplets are not assumed to be circles or ellipses during segmentation process, which utilizes morphological operations and thresholding. The evolution of single droplets in the jet flow were monitored via Particle Shadow Sizing (PSS) technique where they were tracked with 86% average accuracy and 15 fps real-time performance.