Predicting high-resolution turbulence details in space and time

Abstract

Predicting the fine and intricate details of a turbulent flow field in both space and time from a coarse input remains a major challenge despite the availability of modern machine learning tools. In this paper, we present a simple and effective dictionary-based approach to spatio-temporal upsampling of fluid simulation. We demonstrate that our neural network approach can reproduce the visual complexity of turbulent flows from spatially and temporally coarse velocity fields even when using a generic training set. Moreover, since our method generates finer spatial and/or temporal details through embarrassingly-parallel upsampling of small local patches, it can efficiently predict high-resolution turbulence details across a variety of grid resolutions. As a consequence, our method offers a whole range of applications varying from fluid flow upsampling to fluid data compression. We demonstrate the efficiency and generalizability of our method for synthesizing turbulent flows on a series of complex examples, highlighting dramatically better results in spatio-temporal upsampling and flow data compression than existing methods as assessed by both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.