SSR-VFD: Spatial Super-Resolution for Vector Field Data Analysis and Visualization

We present SSR-VFD, a novel deep learning framework that produces coherent spatial super-resolution (SSR) of three-dimensional vector field data (VFD). SSR-VFD is the first work that advocates a machine learning approach to generate high-resolution vector fields from low-resolution ones. The core of SSR-VFD lies in the use of three separate neural nets that take the three components of a low-resolution vector field as input and jointly output a synthesized high-resolution vector field. To capture spatial coherence, we take into account magnitude and angle losses in network optimization. Our method can work in the in situ scenario where VFD are down-sampled at simulation time for storage saving and these reduced VFD are upsampled back to their original resolution during postprocessing. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SSR-VFD, we show quantitative and qualitative results with several vector field data sets of different characteristics and compare our method against volume upscaling using bicubic interpolation, and two solutions based on CNN and GAN, respectively.