Acceleration of Tomo-PIV by estimating the initial volume intensity distribution

Tomographic particle image velocimetry (Tomo-PIV) is a promising new PIV technique. However, its high computational costs often make time-resolved measurements impractical. In this paper, a new preprocessing method is proposed to estimate the initial volume intensity distribution. This relatively inexpensive first guess procedure significantly reduces the computational costs, accelerates solution convergence, and can be used directly to obtain results up to 35 times faster than an iterative reconstruction algorithm (with only a slight accuracy penalty). Reconstruction accuracy is also assessed by examining the errors in recovering velocity fields from artificial data (rather than errors in the particle reconstructions themselves).