Deep Learning Improvements for Sparse Spatial Field Reconstruction
This work addresses computational efficiency in spatial field reconstruction for scientists, but it is incremental as it builds on prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing global spatial fields from sparse data in domains like Earth Sciences and Fluid Dynamics, proposing adjustments to an existing machine learning method and showing improvements on geoscience and fluid dynamics simulation datasets.
Accurately reconstructing a global spatial field from sparse data has been a longstanding problem in several domains, such as Earth Sciences and Fluid Dynamics. Historically, scientists have approached this problem by employing complex physics models to reconstruct the spatial fields. However, these methods are often computationally intensive. With the increase in popularity of machine learning (ML), several researchers have applied ML to the spatial field reconstruction task and observed improvements in computational efficiency. One such method in arXiv:2101.00554 utilizes a sparse mask of sensor locations and a Voronoi tessellation with sensor measurements as inputs to a convolutional neural network for reconstructing the global spatial field. In this work, we propose multiple adjustments to the aforementioned approach and show improvements on geoscience and fluid dynamics simulation datasets. We identify and discuss scenarios that benefit the most using the proposed ML-based spatial field reconstruction approach.