Velocity measurement of granular flow with a Hopfield network
The transport of granular flow is common to many industrial processes. This paper discusses a methodology to measure the velocity of dry granular solids down an inclined chute using high speed digital images. Acrylic particles have been used as granular solids in our experiment. First, particles are located using normalized correlation. A technique for measuring the velocities of individual acrylic particles is developed based on a Hopfield network to solve the particle correspondence problem between successive images. A new, rigidity constraint is applied to the Hopfield energy function, and the results show better performance than the conventional cost function.