Effects of image compression on PIV and PTV analysis

PIV and PTV analysis require the acquisition of series of images, representing the position of seeding particles at different times, resulting in a great amount of data to be stored on magnetic support, such as hard disk and magnetic tape. Typical dimensions of a PIV image are 1000×1000 pixels which results in 1 Mb per image (grey levels) to be stored. In this work the capabilities of different methods for data compression are evaluated and their effects on PIV and PTV analysis are compared.