Particle reconstruction of volumetric particle image velocimetry with strategy of machine learning

Abstract: Three-dimensional particle reconstruction with limited two-dimensional projections is an under-determined inverse problem that the exact solution is often difficult to be obtained. In general, approximate solutions can be obtained by iterative optimization methods. In the current work, a practical particle reconstruction method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) with geometry-informed features is proposed. The proposed technique can refine the particle reconstruction from a very coarse initial guess of particle distribution generated by any traditional algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) based methods. Compared with available ART-based algorithms, the novel technique makes significant improvements in terms of reconstruction quality, {robustness to noises}, and at least an order of magnitude faster in the offline stage.