It is important to accurately identify and measure in-focus droplets from shadowgraph droplet images that typically contain a large number of defocused droplets for the research of multiphase flow. However, conventional in-focus droplet identification methods are time-consuming and laborious due to the noise and background illumination in experimental data. In this paper, a deep-learning-based method called Focus-droplet Generative Adversarial Network (FocGAN) is developed to automatically detect and characterize the focused droplets in shadow images. A generative adversarial network framework is adopted by our model to output binarized images containing only in-focus droplets, and inception blocks are used in the generator to enhance the extraction of multi-scale features. To emulate the real shadow images, an algorithm based on the Gauss blur method is developed to generate paired datasets to train the networks. The detailed architecture and performance of the model were investigated and evaluated by both the synthetic data and spray experimental data. The results show that the present learning-based method is far superior to the traditional adaptive threshold method in terms of effective extraction rate and accuracy. The comprehensive performance of FocGAN, including detection accuracy and robustness to noise, is higher than that of the model based on a convolutional neural network(CNN). Moreover, the identification results of spray images with different droplet number densities clearly exhibit the feasibility of FocGAN in real experiments. This work indicates that the proposed learning-based approach is promising to be widely applied as an efficient and universal tool for processing particle shadowgraph images.
For the shadowgraphy techniques with a single camera, it is difficult to accurately obtain the shape, size and depth location of the droplets out of focus due to the defocus blur. This paper proposed a deep learning-based method to recover the sharp images and infer the depth information from the defocused blur droplets images. The proposed model comprised of a defocus map estimation subnetwork and a defocus deblur subnetwork is optimized with a two-stage strategy. To train the networks, the synthetic blur data generated by the gauss kernel method is utilized as the input data, which mimics the defocused images of droplets. The proposed approach has been assessed based on synthetic images and real sphere blur images. The results demonstrate that our method has satisfactory performance both in terms of depth location estimation and droplet size measurement, e.g., the diameter relative error is less than 5% and the location error is less than 1mm for the sphere with a diameter more than 1mm. Moreover, the present model also exhibits considerable generalization and robustness against the transparent ellipsoid and the random background noise. A further application of the present model to the measurement of transparent water droplets generated by an injector is also explored and illustrates the practicability of the present model in real experiments. The present study indicates that the proposed learning-based method is promising for the three-dimensional measurement of spray droplets via a combination of shadowgraphy techniques using a single camera, which will greatly reduce experimental costs and complexity.
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