Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) has seen a rapid growth over the last two decades, much owing to the developments in digital camera and solid state laser technologies. PIV can essentially be looked upon as an application of pattern matching principles to experiments. We rely upon hardware such as lasers and cameras for illumination and image capture. Subsequently we use computer code to perform the pattern matching. MatPIV is one of a variety of different computer codes available written specifically for this purpose. The vast majority of codes are commercially available, but in the last 7-8 years several Open Source PIV codes have been created and are currently being more or less actively maintained. MatPIV is one of these codes and it is distributed under the GNU General Public License1
This document acts as the entry level tutorial for using the MatPIV code. Very basic theory is reviewed and references to appropriate sources are included. The focus, however, is on the use of MatPIV and how it is implemented.