Background and instrument noise are important considerations in PIV. Each of these is likely to reduce the accuracy of the PIV algorithm. Background noise (allowing something other than the particles showing in your images) is a common error, and users should be sure to keep the background and items in the images covered and/or painted a dark color. The noise in a camera, however, is less controllable, and will also reduce the accuracy of the PIV algorithm.
To mimic the noise in a digital camera, the Noise Mean/Noise SD variables add pseudo-random noise to the image(s). As the noise in a digital camera is approximately lognormally distributed, the synthetic image generator adds a random lognormal pixel intensity to each pixel in the synthetic images according to the distribution defined by the lognormal mean (Noise Mean) and lognormal standard deviation (Noise SD).
Author: Jack Elliott
Date Published: June, 2022