English

HDNet: Physics-Inspired Neural Network for Flow Estimation based on Helmholtz Decomposition

Machine Learning 2024-06-14 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Flow estimation problems are ubiquitous in scientific imaging. Often, the underlying flows are subject to physical constraints that can be exploited in the flow estimation; for example, incompressible (divergence-free) flows are expected for many fluid experiments, while irrotational (curl-free) flows arise in the analysis of optical distortions and wavefront sensing. In this work, we propose a Physics- Inspired Neural Network (PINN) named HDNet, which performs a Helmholtz decomposition of an arbitrary flow field, i.e., it decomposes the input flow into a divergence-only and a curl-only component. HDNet can be trained exclusively on synthetic data generated by reverse Helmholtz decomposition, which we call Helmholtz synthesis. As a PINN, HDNet is fully differentiable and can easily be integrated into arbitrary flow estimation problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.08570,
  title  = {HDNet: Physics-Inspired Neural Network for Flow Estimation based on Helmholtz Decomposition},
  author = {Miao Qi and Ramzi Idoughi and Wolfgang Heidrich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.08570},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:03:40.929Z