Self‐attention residual network‐based spatial super‐resolution synthesis for time‐varying volumetric data

Abstract

In the field of scientific visualization, the upscaling of time‐varying volume is meaningful. It can be used in in situ visualization to help scientists overcome the limitations of I/O speed and storage capacity when analysing and visualizing large‐scale, time‐varying simulation data. This paper proposes self‐attention residual network‐based spatial super‐resolution (SARN‐SSR), a spatial super‐resolution model based on self‐attention residual networks that can generate time‐varying data with temporal coherence. SARN‐SSR consists of two components: a generator and a discriminator. The generator takes the low‐resolution volume sequences as the input and gives the corresponding high‐resolution volume sequences as the output. The discriminator takes both synthesized and real high‐resolution volume sequence as the input and gives a matrix to predict the realness as the output. To verify the validity of SARN‐SSR, four sets of time‐varying volume datasets are applied from scientific simulation. In addition, SARN‐SSR is compared on these datasets, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with two deep learning‐based techniques and one traditional technique. The experimental results show that by using this method, the closest time‐varying data to the ground truth can be obtained.