Particle location based on Circular Hough Transform and Quadrant Radius Histogram

This paper presents a method for particle location based on Circular Hough Transform and Quadrant Radius Histogram in Particle Image Velocimetry. Different from the existing approaches, 2D Gaussian function is not used to describe the particle intensity profile because of defocusing. In proposed method, Circular Hough Transform was employed to detect the particle and calculate the initial particle center coordinate, and then the Quadrant Radius Histogram was applied to modify the initial particle center coordinate more accurately. Experiments on real particle images have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method for focused and defocused particle location, and the mean MAE of the distance between the estimated particle center and the real particle center for all experimental particle images is about 0.624 pixels.