Stochastic uncertainty models for motion estimation

Participants : Shengze Cai, Etienne Mémin, Musaab Khalid Osman Mohammed.

The objective consists here in relying on a stochastic transport formulation to propose a luminance conservation assumption dedicated to the measurement of large-scale fluid flows velocity. This formulation has the great advantage to incorporate from the beginning an uncertainty on the motion measurement. This uncertainty modeled as a possibly inhomogeneous random field uncorrelated in time can be estimated jointly to the motion estimates. Such a formulation, besides providing estimates of the velocity field and of its associated uncertainties, allows us to naturally define a linear multiresolution scale-space framework. It provides also a reinterpretation, in terms of uncertainty, of classical regularization functionals proposed in the context of motion estimation. This estimator, which extend a local motion estimator previously proposed in the team, has shown to improve significantly the results of the corresponding deterministic estimator. This kind method is assessed in the context of river hydrologics applications through a collaboration with an Irstea Lyon research group (HHLY). This study is performed within the PhD thesis of Musaab Mohammed.

Development of an image-based measurement method for large-scale characterization of indoor airflows

Participants : Dominique Heitz, Etienne Mémin, Romain Schuster.

The goal is to design a new image-based flow measurement method for large-scale industrial applications. From this point of view, providing in situ measurement technique requires the development of precise models relating the large-scale flow observations to the velocity, appropriate large-scale regularization strategies, and adapted seeding and lighting systems, like Hellium Filled Soap Bubles (HFSB) and led ramp lighting.This work conducted within the PhD of Romain Schuster in collaboration with the compagny ITGA has started in february 2016. The first step has been to evaluate the performances of a stochastic uncertainty motion estimator when using large scale scalar images, like those obtained when seeding a flow with smoke.

3D flows reconstruction from image data

Participants : Dominique Heitz, Cédric Herzet.

Our work focuses on the design of new tools for the estimation of 3D turbulent flow motion in the experimental setup of Tomo-PIV. This task includes both the study of physically-sound models on the observations and the fluid motion, and the design of low-complexity and accurate estimation algorithms.

This year, we keep on our investigation on the problem of efficient volume reconstruction. Our work takes place within the context of some modern optimization techniques. First, we focussed our attention on the family of proximal and splitting methods and showed that the standard techniques commonly adopted in the TomoPIV literature can be seen as particular cases of such methodologies. Recasting standard methodologies in a more general framework allowed us to propose extensions of the latter: i) we showed that the parcimony characterizing the sought volume can be accounted for without increasing the complexity of the algorithms (e.g., by including simple thresholding operations); ii) we emphasized that the speed of convergence of the standard reconstruction algorithms can be improved by using Nesterov’s acceleration schemes; iii) we also proposed a totally novel way of reconstructing the volume by using the so-called “alternating direction of multipliers method" (ADMM). In 2016, this work has led to the publication of a contribution in the international journal IOP Measurement Science and Technology.

On top of this work, we also focussed on another crucial step of the volume reconstruction problem, namely the pruning of the model. The pruning task consists in identifying some positions in the volume of interest which cannot contains any particle. Removing this position from the problem can then potentially allow for a dramatic dimensionality reduction. This year, we provide a methodological answer to this problem through the prism of the so-called "screening" techniques which have been proposed in the community of machine learning. In 2016, this work led to the publication of one contribution in the proceedings of the international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP’16).

Sparse-representation algorithms

Participant : Cédric Herzet.

The paradigm of sparse representations is a rather new concept which turns out to be central in many domains of signal processing. In particular, in the field of fluid motion estimation, sparse representation appears to be potentially useful at several levels: i) it provides a relevant model for the characterization of the velocity field in some scenarios; ii) it plays a crucial role in the recovery of volumes of particles in the 3D Tomo-PIV problem.

Unfortunately, the standard sparse representation problem is known to be NP hard. Therefore, heuristic procedures have to be devised to access to the solution of this problem. Among the popular methods available in the literature, one can mention orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), orthogonal least squares (OLS) and the family of procedures based on the minimization of sparsity inducing norms. In order to assess and improve the performance of these algorithms, theoretical works have been undertaken in order to understand under which conditions these procedures can succeed in recovering the "true" sparse vector.

This year, we contributed to this research axis by deriving conditions of success for the algorithms mentioned above when the amplitudes of the nonzero coefficients in the sparse vector obey some decay. In a TomoPIV context, this decay corresponds to the fact that not all the particles in the fluid diffuse the same quantity of light (notably because of illumination or radius variation). In particular, we show that the standard coherence-based guarantees for OMP/OLS can be relaxed by an amount which depends on the decay of the nonzero coefficients. In 2016, our work has led to the publication of one paper in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

We also investigated a new methodology to take sparsity into account into variational assimilation problems. We focussed on the problem of estimating of scalar transported by an unknown velocity field, when only low-resolution observations of the scalar are supposed to be available. The goal is to reconstruct both a high-resolution version of the scalar and the velocity field, assuming that these quantities admit a sparse decomposition in some proper frames. The associated optimization problem typically involves millions of variables and thus requires dedicated optimization procedures to be tractable. In 2016, we proposed a new assimilation scheme combining state-of-the-art optimization techniques (forward-backward propagation, ADMM, Attouch’s procedure) to address this problem. Our algorithm is provably convergent while exhibiting a complexity per iteration evolving linearly with the problem’s dimensions. This contribution has led to a journal publication in SIAM Journal on Imaging Science.