Deep learning method for super-resolution reconstruction of the spatio-temporal flow field

Abstract The high-resolution (HR) spatio-temporal flow field plays a decisive role in describing the details of the flow field. In the acquisition of the HR flow field, traditional direct numerical simulation (DNS) and other methods face a seriously high computational burden. To address this deficiency, we propose a novel multi-scale temporal path UNet (MST-UNet) model to reconstruct temporal and spatial HR flow fields from low-resolution (LR) flow field data. Different from the previous super-resolution (SR) model, which only takes advantage of LR flow field data at instantaneous (SLR) or in a time-series (MTLR), MST-UNet introduces multi-scale information in both time and space. MST-UNet takes the LR data at the current frame and the predicted HR result at the previous moment as the model input to complete the spatial SR reconstruction. On this basis, a temporal model is introduced as the inbetweening model to obtain HR flow field data in space and time to complete spatio-temporal SR reconstruction. Finally, the proposed model is validated by the spatio-temporal SR task of the flow field around two-dimensional cylinders. Experimental results show that the outcome of the MST-UNet model in spatial SR tasks is much better than those of SLR and MTLR, which can greatly improve prediction accuracy. In addition, for the spatio-temporal SR task, the spatio-temporal HR flow field predicted by the MST-UNet model has higher accuracy either.