Continuous Field Reconstruction from Sparse Observations with Implicit Neural Networks

Reliably reconstructing physical fields from sparse sensor data is a challenge that frequenty arises in many scientific domains. In practice, the process generating the data is often not known to sufficient accuracy. Therefore, there is a growing interest in the deep neural network route to the problem. In this work, we present a novel approach that learns a continuous representation of the field using implicit neural representations (INR). Specifically, after factorizing spatiotemporal variability into spatial and temporal components using the technique of separation of variables, the method learns relevant basis functions from sparsely sampled irregular data points to thus develop a continuous representation of the data. In experimental evaluations, the proposed model outperforms recent INR methods, offering superior reconstruction quality on simulation data from a state of the art climate model and on a second dataset that comprises of ultra-high resolution satellite-based sea surface temperature field. Website for the Project: Both data and code are accessible.