Forward and inverse modeling of depth-of-field effects in background-oriented schlieren
Abstract
We report a novel "cone-ray" model of background-oriented schlieren (BOS) imaging that accounts for depth-of-field effects. Reconstructions of the density field performed with this model are far more robust to the blur associated with a finite aperture than conventional reconstructions, which presume a "thin-ray" pinhole camera. Our model is characterized and validated using forward evaluations based on simulated and experimental BOS measurements of buoyancy-driven flow and hypersonic flow over a sphere. Moreover, we embed the model in a neural reconstruction algorithm, which is demonstrated with a total variation penalty as well as the compressible Euler equations. Our cone-ray technique dramatically improves the accuracy of BOS reconstructions: the shock interface is well-resolved in all our tests, irrespective of the camera's aperture setting, which spans f-numbers from 22 down to 4.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.15954,
title = {Forward and inverse modeling of depth-of-field effects in background-oriented schlieren},
author = {Joseph P. Molnar and Elijah J. LaLonde and Christopher S. Combs and Olivier Léon and David Donjat and Samuel J. Grauer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.15954},
year = {2026}
}