Edge Detection and Machine Learning Approach to Identify Flow Structures on Schlieren and Shadowgraph Images

Schlieren, shadowgraph and other types of refraction-based techniques have been often used to study gas flow structures. They can capture strong density gradients, such as shock waves. Shock wave detection is a very important task in analyzing unsteady gas flows. High-speed imaging systems, including high-speed cameras, are widely used to record large arrays of shadowgraph images. To process large datasets of the high-speed shadowgraph images and automatically detect shock waves, convective plumes and other gas flow structures, two computer software systems based on the edge detection and machine learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN) were developed. The edge-detection software utilizes image filtering, noise removing, background image subtraction in the frequency domain and edge detection based on the Canny algorithm. The machine learning software is based on CNN. We developed two neural networks working together. The first one classifies the image dataset and finds images with shock waves. The other CNN solves the regression task and defines shock wave position (single number) based on image pixels tensor (3-D array of numbers) for each image. The supervised learning code based on example input-output pairs was developed to train models. It was shown, that the machine learning approach gives better results in shock wave detection accuracy, especially for low-quality images with a strong noise level. Software system for automated shadowgraph images processing and x-t curves of the shock wave and convective plume movement plotting was developed.