Physics-Informed is an approach that integrates physical laws and principles directly into the learning or modeling process. This is often done to improve the accuracy, reliability, and interpretability of models, especially in domains where physical phenomena play a crucial role, such as engineering, fluid dynamics, materials science, and structural health monitoring.

Posts

Event Classification by Physics-Informed Inpainting for Distributed Multichannel Acoustic Sensor with Partially Degraded Channels

/in /by

Distributed multichannel acoustic sensing (DMAS) enables large-scale sound event classification (SEC), but performance drops when many channels are degraded and when sensor layouts at test time differ from training layouts. We propose a learning-free, physics-informed inpainting frontend based on reverse time migration (RTM). In this approach, observed multichannel spectrograms are first back-propagated on a 3D grid using an analytic Green’s function to form a scene-consistent image, and then forward-projected to reconstruct inpainted signals before log–mel feature extraction and transformer-based classification. We evaluate the method on ESC-50 with 50 sensors and three layouts (circular, linear, right-angle), where per-channel SNRs are sampled from ?30 to 0 dB. Compared with an AST baseline, scaling-sparsemax channel selection, and channel-swap augmentation, the proposed RTM frontend achieves the best or competitive accuracy across all layouts, improving accuracy by 13.1 points on the right-angle layout (from 9.7% to 22.8%). Correlation analyses show that spatial weights align more strongly with SNR than with channel–source distance, and that higher SNR–weight correlation corresponds to higher SEC accuracy. These results demonstrate that a reconstruct-then-project, physics-based preprocessing effectively complements learning-only methods for DMAS under layout-open configurations and severe channel degradation.

Read more

Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing for Fault Localization Caused by Fallen Tree Using Physics-informed ResNet

/in /by

Falling trees or their limbs can cause power lines to break or sag, sometimes resulting in devastating wildfires. Conventional protections such as circuit breakers, overcurrent relays and automatic circuit reclosers may clear short circuits caused by tree contact, but they may not detect cases where the conductors remain intact or a conducting path is not sufficient to create a full short circuit. In this paper, we introduce a novel, non-intrusive monitoring technique that detects and locates fallen trees, even if a short circuit is not triggered. This method employs distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) to detect vibrations along the power distribution line where corresponding fiber cables are installed. A physics-informed ResNet model is then utilized to interpret this information and accurately locate fallen trees, which sets it apart from traditional black-box predictions of machine learning algorithms. Our real-scale lab tests demonstrate highly accurate and reliable fallen tree detection and localization.

Read more