The Effect of Parameterization on a Reconfigurable Implementation of PIV

This paper presents PARPIV, the design and prototyping of a highly parameterized digital Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system implemented on reconfigurable hardware. Despite many improvements to PIV methods over the last twenty years, PIV postprocessing remains a computationally intensive task. It becomes a serious bottleneck as camera acquisition rates reach 1000 frames per second. Besides, in different engineering applications, different PIV parameters are required. Up to now, there is no PIV system that combines both flexible parameterization and high computational performance. In our research we are creating such a system. This implementation is highly parameterized, supporting adaptation to a variety of setups and application domains. The circuit is parameterized by the dimensions of the captured images as well as the dimensions of the interrogation windows and sub-areas, pixel representation, board memory width, displacement and overlap. Through this work a parameterized library of different VHDL components was built. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first highly parameterized PIV system implemented on reconfigurable hardware reported in the literature. We report the speedup in hardware over a standard software implementation of 10 different implementations with different parameters.