BOS Airflow Visualization

Visualizing air-density changes around the body with background-oriented schlieren, and a real-time FPGA processing demo

Period: 2019–2021
Field: Flow visualization / FPGA / HCI
Role: First author; design and implementation

Visualized breath in four states: calm, exhausted, laughing, coughing

Summary

Air-density changes around the body are visualized with the background-oriented schlieren (BOS) method; interaction with objects and humans based on the visualized flow was reported at the international conference HCII 2021.

Real-time processing on an FPGA (Zynq) was implemented in Verilog.

Specifications

Method: Background-oriented schlieren (BOS)
Software: Python, Jupyter Notebook
Hardware: Real-time processing on FPGA (Zynq)
HDL: Verilog 2001
Capture: Interchangeable-lens camera
Output: Density gradient (spatial) mapped to grayscale

Figures

Air flow around a cold can and a warm can (real-time BOS)

Videos

Case study YouTube

Real-time BOS visualization on FPGA YouTube

Outputs

Interaction with objects and humans based on visualized flow using a background-oriented schlieren method — HCII 2021 (LNCS, Springer)
Presentation: Campus OJT Hardware Course, University of Tsukuba — real-time BOS density-field visualization on FPGA