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Abstract The influence of several potential error sources and non-ideal experimental effects on the accuracy of a wavelet-based optical flow velocimetry (wOFV) method when applied to tracer particle images is evaluated using data from a series of synthetic flows. Out-of-plane particle displacements, severe image noise, laser sheet thickness reduction, and image intensity non-uniformity are shown to decrease the accuracy of wOFV in a similar manner to correlation-based particle image velocimetry (PIV). For the error sources tested, wOFV displays a similar or slightly increased sensitivity compared to PIV, but the wOFV results are still more accurate than PIV when the magnitude of the non-ideal effects remain within expected experimental bounds. For the majority of test cases, the results are significantly improved by using image pre-processing filters and the magnitude of improvement is consistent between wOFV and PIV. Flow divergence does not appear to have an appreciable effect on the accuracy of wOFV velocity estimation, even though the underlying fluid transport equation on which wOFV is based implicitly assumes that the motion is divergence-free. This is a significant finding for the broader applicability of planar velocimetry measurements using wOFV. Finally, it is noted that the accuracy of wOFV is not reduced notably in regions of the image between tracer particles, as long as the overall seeding density is not too sparse i.e. below 0.02 particles per pixel. This explicitly demonstrates that wOFV (when applied to particle images) yields an accurate whole field measurement, and not only at or adjacent to the discrete particle locations.