FDM data driven U-Net as a 2D Laplace PINN solver

Abstract

Efficient solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) of physical laws is of interest for manifold applications in computer science and image analysis. However, conventional domain discretization techniques for numerical solving PDEs such as Finite Difference (FDM), Finite Element (FEM) methods are unsuitable for real-time applications and are also quite laborious in adaptation to new applications, especially for non-experts in numerical mathematics and computational modeling. More recently, alternative approaches to solving PDEs using the so-called Physically Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) received increasing attention because of their straightforward application to new data and potentially more efficient performance. In this work, we present a novel data-driven approach to solve 2D Laplace PDE with arbitrary boundary conditions using deep learning models trained on a large set of reference FDM solutions. Our experimental results show that both forward and inverse 2D Laplace problems can efficiently be solved using the proposed PINN approach with nearly real-time performance and average accuracy of 94% for different types of boundary value problems compared to FDM. In summary, our deep learning based PINN PDE solver provides an efficient tool with various applications in image analysis and computational simulation of image-based physical boundary value problems.