Digital Particle Image Velocimetry: Partial Image Error (PIE)

This paper quantifies the errors due to partial imaging of seeding particles which occur at the edges of interrogation regions in Digital Particle Image Velocimetry (DPIV). Hitherto, in the scientific literature the effect of these partial images has been assumed to be negligible. The results show that the error is significant even at a commonly used interrogation region size of 32 x 32 pixels. If correlation of interrogation region sizes of 16 x 16 pixels and smaller is attempted, the error which occurs can preclude meaningful results being obtained. In order to reduce the error normalisation of the correlation peak values is necessary. The paper introduces Normalisation by Signal Strength (NSS) as the preferred means of normalisation for optimum accuracy. In addition, it is shown that NSS increases the dynamic range of DPIV.