NeMF: Neural Microphysics Fields

Inverse problems in scientific imaging often seek physical characterization of heterogeneous scene materials. The scene is thus represented by physical quantities, such as the density and sizes of particles (microphysics) across a domain. Moreover, the forward image formation model is physical. An important case is that of clouds, where microphysics in three dimensions (3D) dictate the cloud dynamics, lifetime and albedo, with implications to Earth's energy balance, sustainable energy and rainfall. Current methods, however, recover very degenerate representations of microphysics. To enable 3D volumetric recovery of all the required microphysical parameters, we introduce the neural microphysics field (NeMF). It is based on a deep neural network, whose input is multi-view polarization images. NeMF is pre-trained through supervised learning. Training relies on polarized radiative transfer, and noise modeling in polarization-sensitive sensors. The results offer unprecedented recovery, including droplet effective variance. We test NeMF in rigorous simulations and demonstrate it using real-world polarization-image data.