A Virtual Particle Images Generation System for 3D-PTV Verification☆

Abstract The paper describes a virtual particle images generation system for 3D-PTV (Particle Tracking Velocimetry) verification. It's used for evaluating the accuracy of PTV algorithms and simulating the real experimental setup. At the first time, mass of virtual particles are generated in the world coordinate system and placed in the virtual flow field. After the camera system conversion from world coordinate to pixel coordinate is applied, the virtual particle images are produced. And the movement of virtual particles can be specified by researchers or given by the flow simulation results in FLUENT. The numbers of cameras and all the parameters of cameras both can be modified in this system. Even more, the illumination model of visual particles, geometry shape variation of visual particles, and defocus blur of visual particles are carefully considered here. Therefore, the virtual particle images generation system can fairly simulate real PTV setup and generate the virtual particle image sequences. It would be helpful to optimize the placement of cameras and the images quality of a real PTV. In addition, a well-known open-source PTV software is used to test the virtual particle images. The result shows that the virtual particles and its tracks can be calculated out as the images from real PTV cameras. As expected, the mismatching of particles in the results can easily be found through the comparison to the specified particles motion.