Fluid Viscosity Prediction Leveraging Computer Vision and Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel deep learning approach using computer vision and autoencoders to predict fluid viscosity from video data of oscillating fluids, enabling near real-time estimation.

Contribution

It introduces a self-supervised 3D autoencoder for extracting features from fluid oscillation videos, achieving high accuracy in viscosity classification and regression tasks.

Findings

97.1% classification accuracy on fluid categories

Mean absolute error of 0.258 in viscosity regression

Demonstrates potential for real-time fluid viscosity estimation

Abstract

Accurately determining fluid viscosity is crucial for various industrial and scientific applications. Traditional methods of viscosity measurement, though reliable, often require manual intervention and cannot easily adapt to real-time monitoring. With advancements in machine learning and computer vision, this work explores the feasibility of predicting fluid viscosity by analyzing fluid oscillations captured in video data. The pipeline employs a 3D convolutional autoencoder pretrained in a self-supervised manner to extract and learn features from semantic segmentation masks of oscillating fluids. Then, the latent representations of the input data, produced from the pretrained autoencoder, is processed with a distinct inference head to infer either the fluid category (classification) or the fluid viscosity (regression) in a time-resolved manner. When the latent representations generated by the pretrained autoencoder are used for classification, the system achieves a 97.1% accuracy across a total of 4,140 test datapoints. Similarly, for regression tasks, employing an additional fully-connected network as a regression head allows the pipeline to achieve a mean absolute error of 0.258 over 4,416 test datapoints. This study represents an innovative contribution to both fluid characterization and the evolving landscape of Artificial Intelligence, demonstrating the potential of deep learning in achieving near real-time viscosity estimation and addressing practical challenges in fluid dynamics through the analysis of video data capturing oscillating fluid dynamics.