Velocity measurement of microchannel flow with micro-PIV using optical flow estimation

An optical flow technique based on the local intensity-based differential method was applied to evaluate the velocity field of flow in a microchannel with micro-PIV. It is shown that the vector field with optical flow technique agrees well with the one using classical cross correlation. Results show that both the velocity field and the averaged velocity profile appear quite physically reasonable. With the advantage of yielding the subpixel accuracy robustly at spare tracing particle density, the optical flow method show potential in flow estimation.