Topology Aware Neural Interpolation of Scalar Fields

Abstract: This paper presents a neural scheme for the topology-aware interpolation of time-varying scalar fields. Given a time-varying sequence of persistence diagrams, along with a sparse temporal sampling of the corresponding scalar fields, denoted as keyframes, our interpolation approach aims at "inverting" the non-keyframe diagrams to produce plausible estimations of the corresponding, missing data. For this, we rely on a neural architecture which learns the relation from a time value to the corresponding scalar field, based on the keyframe examples, and reliably extends this relation to the non-keyframe time steps. We show how augmenting this architecture with specific topological losses exploiting the input diagrams both improves the geometrical and topological reconstruction of the non-keyframe time steps. At query time, given an input time value for which an interpolation is desired, our approach instantaneously produces an output, via a single propagation of the time input through the network. Experiments interpolating 2D and 3D time-varying datasets show our approach superiority, both in terms of data and topological fitting, with regard to reference interpolation schemes.