SwitchNet: a neural network model for forward and inverse scattering problems
This work addresses a domain-specific challenge in computational physics for researchers dealing with scattering problems, offering a more efficient method than fully connected networks.
The authors tackled the problem of solving wave equation-based inverse scattering problems by proposing SwitchNet, a neural network architecture that maps between scatterers and scattered fields, achieving promising accuracy in numerical experiments.
We propose a novel neural network architecture, SwitchNet, for solving the wave equation based inverse scattering problems via providing maps between the scatterers and the scattered field (and vice versa). The main difficulty of using a neural network for this problem is that a scatterer has a global impact on the scattered wave field, rendering typical convolutional neural network with local connections inapplicable. While it is possible to deal with such a problem using a fully connected network, the number of parameters grows quadratically with the size of the input and output data. By leveraging the inherent low-rank structure of the scattering problems and introducing a novel switching layer with sparse connections, the SwitchNet architecture uses much fewer parameters and facilitates the training process. Numerical experiments show promising accuracy in learning the forward and inverse maps between the scatterers and the scattered wave field.