A PTV Method Based on SIFT Feature Points Matching for Velocimetry Measurement of Oil-water Two-phase Flow in Horizontal Pipelines

Due to the advantages of scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature points on the invariant to image scale, brightness, rotation, occlusion, noise and so on, this paper proposes a Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) method, based on SIFT feature points matching for velocity measurement of oil-water two-phase flow in horizontal pipelines. The oil-water two-phase flow with large droplet diameter, oil droplets overlap, ununiform lighting, and the centroid position of oil droplets can’t be obtained only by using traditional PTV methods through morphological processing. However, in this paper, the algorithm can directly achieve the average velocity of the flow field according to the positions of correctly matched SIFT feature points, and there is no need to extract the centroid coordinates of each oil droplet. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm not only can be used in the average velocity measurement of oil-water twophase flow in horizontal pipelines, but also can reach 95% in the measuring accuracy when the matching feature points are enough sufficient.