Deep Learning Aided Interpolation of Spatio-Temporal Nonstationary Data

Despite the growing interest in many fields, spatio-temporal (ST) interpolation remains challenging. Given ST nonstationary data distributed sparsely and irregularly over space, our objective is to obtain an equidistant representation of the region of interest (ROI). For this reason, an equidistant grid is defined within the ROI, where the available time series data are arranged, and the time series of the unobserved points are interpolated. Aiming to maintain the interpretability of the whole process while offering flexibility and fast execution, this work presents a ST interpolation framework which combines a statistical technique with deep learning. Our framework is generic and not confined to a specific application, which also provides the prediction confidence. To evaluate its validity, this framework is applied to ultrasound nondestructive testing (UT) data as an example. After the training with synthetic UT data sets, our framework is shown to yield accurate predictions when applied to measured UT data.