Tracking water droplets under descent and deformation

Abstract

We present a system for tracking the movement and deformation of drops of water in free fall and collision. Our data comes from a high-speed camera which records 60,000 frames per second. The data is noisy, and is compromised by an unfortunate camera angle and poor lighting which contribute to caustics, reflections, and shadows in the image. Given an input video, we apply techniques from image processing, computer vision and computational geometry to track the the droplet's position and shape. While our tool could monitor the movement of transparent fluids in a more general environment, our data specifically depicts water colliding with hydrophobic materials. The output of our processing is used by materials scientists to better our understanding of the interactions between water and hydrophobic surfaces. These interactions have direct application in the materials engineering of next generation printing technologies.