Xuanxuan Yang

Xuanxuan Yang, Yangming Zhang, Haofeng Chen et al.

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a highly ill-posed inverse problem, with the challenge of reconstructing internal conductivities using only boundary voltage measurements. Although Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have shown potential in solving inverse problems, existing approaches are limited in their applicability to EIT, as they often rely on impractical prior knowledge and assumptions that cannot be satisfied in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage hybrid learning framework that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and PINNs. This framework integrates data-driven and model-driven paradigms, blending supervised and unsupervised learning to reconstruct conductivity distributions while ensuring adherence to the underlying physical laws, thereby overcoming the constraints of existing methods.

Xuanxuan Yang, Xiuyang Zhang, Haofeng Chen et al.

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) provides an attractive solution for large-area tactile sensing due to its minimal wiring and shape flexibility, but its nonlinear inverse problem often leads to severe artifacts and inaccurate contact reconstruction. This work presents PhyDNN, a physics-driven deep reconstruction framework that embeds the EIT forward model directly into the learning objective. By jointly minimizing the discrepancy between predicted and ground-truth conductivity maps and enforcing consistency with the forward PDE, PhyDNN reduces the black-box nature of deep networks and improves both physical plausibility and generalization. To enable efficient backpropagation, we design a differentiable forward-operator network that accurately approximates the nonlinear EIT response, allowing fast physics-guided training. Extensive simulations and real tactile experiments on a 16-electrode soft sensor show that PhyDNN consistently outperforms NOSER, TV, and standard DNNs in reconstructing contact shape, location, and pressure distribution. PhyDNN yields fewer artifacts, sharper boundaries, and higher metric scores, demonstrating its effectiveness for high-quality tomographic tactile sensing.

Yang Xuanxuan, Zhang Yangming, Chen Haofeng et al.

This paper introduces a hybrid learning framework that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to address the challenging problem of full-inverse electrical impedance tomography (EIT). EIT is a noninvasive imaging technique that reconstructs the spatial distribution of internal conductivity based on boundary voltage measurements from injected currents. This method has applications across medical imaging, multiphase flow detection, and tactile sensing. However, solving EIT involves a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) derived from Maxwell's equations, posing significant computational challenges as an ill-posed inverse problem. Existing PINN approaches primarily address semi-inverse EIT, assuming full access to internal potential data, which limits practical applications in realistic, full-inverse scenarios. Our framework employs a forward CNN-based supervised network to map differential boundary voltage measurements to a discrete potential distribution under fixed Neumann boundary conditions, while an inverse PINN-based unsupervised network enforces PDE constraints for conductivity reconstruction. Instead of traditional automatic differentiation, we introduce discrete numerical differentiation to bridge the forward and inverse networks, effectively decoupling them, enhancing modularity, and reducing computational demands. We validate our framework under realistic conditions, using a 16-electrode setup and rigorous testing on complex conductivity distributions with sharp boundaries, without Gaussian smoothing. This approach demonstrates robust flexibility and improved applicability in full-inverse EIT, establishing a practical solution for real-world imaging challenges.