Physics-informed inference of aerial animal movements from weather radar data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lippert, Fiona, Kranstauber, Bart, van Loon, E. Emiel, Forré, Patrick
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author Lippert, Fiona
Kranstauber, Bart
van Loon, E. Emiel
Forré, Patrick
author_facet Lippert, Fiona
Kranstauber, Bart
van Loon, E. Emiel
Forré, Patrick
contents Studying animal movements is essential for effective wildlife conservation and conflict mitigation. For aerial movements, operational weather radars have become an indispensable data source in this respect. However, partial measurements, incomplete spatial coverage, and poor understanding of animal behaviours make it difficult to reconstruct complete spatio-temporal movement patterns from available radar data. We tackle this inverse problem by learning a mapping from high-dimensional radar measurements to low-dimensional latent representations using a convolutional encoder. Under the assumption that the latent system dynamics are well approximated by a locally linear Gaussian transition model, we perform efficient posterior estimation using the classical Kalman smoother. A convolutional decoder maps the inferred latent system states back to the physical space in which the known radar observation model can be applied, enabling fully unsupervised training. To encourage physical consistency, we additionally introduce a physics-informed loss term that leverages known mass conservation constraints. Our experiments on synthetic radar data show promising results in terms of reconstruction quality and data-efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_04539
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-informed inference of aerial animal movements from weather radar data
Lippert, Fiona
Kranstauber, Bart
van Loon, E. Emiel
Forré, Patrick
Machine Learning
Studying animal movements is essential for effective wildlife conservation and conflict mitigation. For aerial movements, operational weather radars have become an indispensable data source in this respect. However, partial measurements, incomplete spatial coverage, and poor understanding of animal behaviours make it difficult to reconstruct complete spatio-temporal movement patterns from available radar data. We tackle this inverse problem by learning a mapping from high-dimensional radar measurements to low-dimensional latent representations using a convolutional encoder. Under the assumption that the latent system dynamics are well approximated by a locally linear Gaussian transition model, we perform efficient posterior estimation using the classical Kalman smoother. A convolutional decoder maps the inferred latent system states back to the physical space in which the known radar observation model can be applied, enabling fully unsupervised training. To encourage physical consistency, we additionally introduce a physics-informed loss term that leverages known mass conservation constraints. Our experiments on synthetic radar data show promising results in terms of reconstruction quality and data-efficiency.
title Physics-informed inference of aerial animal movements from weather radar data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04539