Computational Imaging and Its Applications in Fluids

  • Jinhui Xiong

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

Computational imaging di↵ers from traditional imaging system by integrating an encoded measurement system and a tailored computational algorithm to extract interesting scene features. This dissertation demonstrates two approaches which apply computational imaging methods to the fluid domain. In the first approach, we study the problem of reconstructing time-varying 3D- 3C fluid velocity vector fields. We extend 2D Particle Imaging Velocimetry to three dimensions by encoding depth into color (a “rainbow”). For reconstruction, we derive an image formation model for recovering stationary 3D particle positions. 3D velocity estimation is achieved with a variant of 3D optical flow that accounts for both physical constraints as well as the rainbow image formation model. This velocity field can be used to refine the position estimate by adding physical priors that tie together all the time steps, forming a joint reconstruction scheme. In the second approach, we study the problem of reconstructing the 3D shape of underwater environments. The distortions from the moving water surface provide a changing parallax for each point on the underwater surface. We utilize this observation by jointly estimating both the underwater geometry and the dynamic shape of the water surface. To this end, we propose a novel di↵erentiable framework to tie together all parameters in an integrated image formation model. To our knowledge, this is the first solution that is capable to simultaneously retrieve the structure of dynamic water surfaces and static underwater scene geometry in the wild.
Date of AwardSep 13 2021
Original languageEnglish (US)
Awarding Institution
  • Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
SupervisorWolfgang Heidrich (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Computational Imaging
  • 3D reconstruction
  • Optimization

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