Multi-camera orientation tracking method for anisotropic particles in particle-laden flows
This method addresses the need for precise orientation tracking in particle-laden flows, which is incremental as it builds on existing multi-camera techniques but focuses specifically on anisotropic particles.
The paper tackles the problem of tracking the 3D location and orientation of anisotropic particles in fluid flows by developing a multi-camera method that reconstructs these parameters using known particle shapes, enabling detailed statistical analysis of particle dynamics.
A method for particle orientation tracking is developed and demonstrated specifically for anisotropic particles. Using (high-speed) multi-camera recordings of anisotropic particles from different viewpoints, we reconstruct the 3D location and orientation of these particles using their known shape. This paper describes an algorithm which tracks the location and orientation of multiple anisotropic particles over time, enabling detailed investigations of location, orientation, and rotation statistics. The robustness and error of this method is quantified, and we explore the effects of noise, image size, the number of used cameras, and the camera arrangement by applying the algorithm to synthetic images. We showcase several use-cases of this method in several experiments (in both quiescent and turbulent fluids), demonstrating the effectiveness and broad applicability of the described tracking method. The proposed method is shown to work for widely different particle shapes, successfully tracks multiple particles simultaneously, and the method can distinguish between different types of particles.