XYclopZ: a Time-Resolved Single-Camera 4D Lagrangian Particle Tracking (4D-LPT) method for democratizing High-Speed flow measurements.

We present a novel single-camera 4D-LPT system for measuring 3D tracer particle positions in flow fields. It uses a single high-speed camera and a spatial monochromatic light modulator placed orthogonally, enabling velocity reconstruction at ~2000 fps. XY coordinates are extracted via 2D particle tracking, while Z positions are inferred from dynamic light intensity generated by structured illumination. A user-friendly GUI and a simplified calibration method, using a tilted target with fiducial markers, enable spatial and intensity-depth map extraction. We tested the method on synthetic data, achieving a depth-position (encoded in intensity) MAE below 0.5%. We benchmark our XYclopZ method against state-of-the-art 4D LPT during concurrent experiments, demonstrating strong performance. Applications in this work include flow around corals, rotating flows, and jets. The setup reduces hardware costs and simplifies implementation compared to Tomographic PIV and STB, helping democratize 3D flow measurements across biological and medical flows, aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing industries

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