A Dynamic Programming based Optical Flow technique has been applied to the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) problem. It has been used for the extraction of dense velocity fields in a planar section of a fluid flow illuminated by a thin laser light sheet. Two (in-plane) components of the velocity vectors can be recovered using a single camera and all three components can be recovered using two or three cameras.
Quantitative performance tests have been carried out on calibrated synthetic image sequences from the PIV Standard Project of the Visualization Society of Japan (VSJ). Results are presented for the 2D flow based sequences (STD01 to STD08 Standard Images) and the 3D flow based sequences (STD301, STD302, STD331 and STD337 Standard Images). The RMS error is within the 2-3 % range and within the 4-8 % range for recovery of the two-component and the three-component velocity vectors respectively.