REV-INR: Regularized Evidential Implicit Neural Representation for Uncertainty-Aware Volume Visualization

TL;DR

REV-INR introduces a novel regularized evidential neural network for volumetric data that provides accurate reconstructions along with reliable uncertainty estimates, enhancing the trustworthiness of volume visualization.

Contribution

It is the first to integrate evidential uncertainty estimation into implicit neural representations for volume data, improving reliability and interpretability.

Findings

REV-INR achieves superior volume reconstruction quality.

It provides fast, reliable uncertainty estimates for data and model.

Enables trustworthy volume visualization and analysis.

Abstract

Applications of Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a promising deep learning approach for compactly representing large volumetric datasets. These models can act as surrogates for volume data, enabling efficient storage and on-demand reconstruction via model predictions. However, conventional deterministic INRs only provide value predictions without insights into the model's prediction uncertainty or the impact of inherent noisiness in the data. This limitation can lead to unreliable data interpretation and visualization due to prediction inaccuracies in the reconstructed volume. Identifying erroneous results extracted from model-predicted data may be infeasible, as raw data may be unavailable due to its large size. To address this challenge, we introduce REV-INR, Regularized Evidential Implicit Neural Representation, which learns to predict data values accurately along with the associated coordinate-level data uncertainty and model uncertainty using only a single forward pass of the trained REV-INR during inference. By comprehensively comparing and contrasting REV-INR with existing well-established deep uncertainty estimation methods, we show that REV-INR achieves the best volume reconstruction quality with robust data (aleatoric) and model (epistemic) uncertainty estimates using the fastest inference time. Consequently, we demonstrate that REV-INR facilitates assessment of the reliability and trustworthiness of the extracted isosurfaces and volume visualization results, enabling analyses to be solely driven by model-predicted data.