  Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is a method of im-aging and analysing fields
of flows. The PIV tech-niques compute and display all the motion vectors of the
field in a resulting image. Speeds more than thou-sand vectors per second can
be required, each speed being environment-dependent. Essence of this work is to
propose an adaptive FPGA-based system for real-time PIV algorithms. The
proposed structure is ge-neric so that this unique structure can be re-used for
any PIV applications that uses the cross-correlation technique. The major
structure remains unchanged, adaptations only concern the number of processing
operations. The required speed (corresponding to the number of vector per
second) is obtained thanks to a parallel processing strategy. The image
processing designer duplicates the processing modules to distrib-ute the
operations. The result is a FPGA-based archi-tecture, which is easily adapted
to algorithm specifica-tions without any hardware requirement. The design flow
is fast and reliable.
