Joint Volumetric Flow Estimation and Tracking of Zooplankton in Turbulence Fluids

The aim of this project is to better understand the collective swimming behavior of zooplankton organisms in turbulence flow. The project can be divided into two subparts which should eventually be solved jointly: dense volumetric reconstruction of turbulence flow from tracer particles and tracking of multiple small organisms in the volume over long time sequences.

The dense reconstruction part includes the adaption of existing optical flow approaches to 3D, solving the correspondence problem for volumetric data. Adequate data and smoothness terms have to be found and evaluated. Furthermore, physical constraints of turbulent fluid flow need to be considered.

For the tracking part existing work in the field of multiple object tracking is considered. Addressed challenges will be dealing with a high amount of objects and hence potential occlusions as well as high visual similarity of individual objects.

The project is joint work with the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group in the Institute of Environmental Engineering.

Contact: Katrin Lasinger