The performance of a direct-injection diesel engine often depends on the strength of swirl or squish, the shape of combustion chamber, the number of nozzle holes, etc. This is natural because the combustion in the cylinder was affected by the mixture formation process. Since the available duration to make the mixture formation of air-fuel is very short, it is difficult to make complete mixture. Therefore, an early stage of combustion is violent, which leads to the weakness of noise and vibration. In this paper, the combustion process of a common-rail diesel engine was studied by employing two kinds of pistons. One has several grooves with inclined plane on the piston crown to generate swirl during the compression and expansion strokes in the cylinder in order to improve the atomization of fuel. The other is a toroidal piston, generally used in high speed diesel engines. To take photographs of flame and flaming duration, a four-stroke diesel engine was remodeled into a two-stroke visible single cylinder engine and a high speed video camera was used.