An autonomous, non-invesive vibration measurement system using stroboscope

Abstract

This paper presents a novel methodology of calculating an object's frequency of vibration autonomously using a camera and mechanism of optical strobing. The camera used has a frame rate of 30 fps and therefore, in the conventional fashion, it is unable to capture meaningful information about any vibration frequency higher than that. Therefore, we utilize the strobing concept with an illumination frequency higher than camera frame rate and modulo (of division) between object's frequency and strobing frequency is captured in video. Motion in the video is tracked using robust optical flow technique. Finally, frequency is calculated from the frequency plot and the illumination frequency of the strobe. Experimental results show that our method is effective in various real scenarios. The method is noninvasive, computationally less expensive and more scalable compared to the existing systems.