Pattern Recognition of Coherent Eddies

Within the past couple of decades, considerable effort has been devoted towards describing turbulent flow fields as a random distribution of coherent eddies (i.e., patterns). The motivation for this approach is to explain the experimental observation of definite flow patterns and to obtain a more tractable analytical formulation of the flow field. Simultaneously the field of mathematical pattern recognition has been developed from earlier work in communication and detection theory. Although it most often finds application in analyzing photographs, written alphabetic characters and other two-dimensional figures, the mathematical tools are much more universal and can be utilized to study transducer outputs and other electronic signals. A brief introduction to pattern recognition is given and its application to the detection of coherent eddies in turbulent flow fields is outlined.