High-Fidelity Compression of Seismic Velocity Models via SIREN Auto-Decoders
Authors: Caiyun Liu, Xiaoxue Luo, Jie Xiong
Organizations: School of Information and Mathematics, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, Hubei 434023, P.R. China · School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, Hubei 434023, P.R. China
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for representing continuous signals independently of grid resolution. In this paper, we propose a high-fidelity neural compression framework based on a SIREN (Sinusoidal Representation Networks) auto-decoder to represent multi-structural seismic velocity models from the OpenFWI benchmark. Our method compresses each 70x70 velocity map (4,900 points) into a compact 256-dimensional latent vector, achieving a compression ratio of 19:1. We evaluate the framework on 1,000 samples across five diverse geological families: FlatVel, CurveVel, FlatFault, CurveFault, and Style. Experimental results demonstrate an average PSNR of 32.47 dB and SSIM of 0.956, indicating high-quality reconstruction. Furthermore, we showcase two key advantages of our implicit representation: (1) smooth latent space interpolation that generates plausible intermediate velocity structures, and (2) zero-shot super-resolution capability that reconstructs velocity fields at arbitrary resolutions up to 280x280 without additional training. The results highlight the potential of INR-based auto-decoders for efficient storage, multi-scale analysis, and downstream geophysical applications such as full waveform inversion.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Comparison of grid-based and implicit neural representations for seismic velocity fields. (a) Ground truth velocity model at 70×70 resolution (velocity range: 1500-4000 m/s). (b) Traditional grid-based representation with 15×15 sampling, showing discretization artifacts at sharp interfaces (highlighted in red). The yellow dashed rectangle indicates a single grid cell with constant velocity value. (c) SIREN implicit representation reconstructing the full 70×70 field from a 256-dimensional latent code, demonstrating continuous, artifact-free modeling with PSNR of 37.93 dB. The white contour lines illustrate the continuous nature of the implicit representation.
Figure 2: Spectral bias comparison between standard ReLU MLP and SIREN. (a) Standard ReLU MLP exhibits strong low-frequency bias, with amplitude dropping rapidly above 25 Hz, failing to capture high-frequency components. (b) SIREN with periodic activation functions maintains near-uniform response across a wide frequency range, enabling accurate representation of sharp features and discontinuities.
Figure 3: Comparison of auto-encoder and auto-decoder architectures. (a) Traditional auto-encoder: input x is encoded into a latent code z by Eϕ , then decoded to x^ by Dθ . (b) Auto-decoder (ours): learnable latent codes {zi} are directly optimized with a shared decoder fθ , eliminating the encoder and using L2 regularization.
Figure 4: SIREN auto-decoder framework overview. Input spatial coordinates (x,z) and a learnable latent code zi are concatenated and fed into the SIREN decoder fθ , which consists of multiple layers with periodic activation functions sin(ω0⋅) . The decoder outputs the reconstructed velocity field V^i(x,z) . During training, the decoder parameters and latent codes are jointly optimized using reconstruction loss and L2 regularization.
Layer
Type
Input Dim
Output Dim
Input Layer
SIREN ( sin )
2+256=258
512
Hidden Layer 1
SIREN ( sin )
512
512
Hidden Layer 2
SIREN ( sin )
512
512
Hidden Layer 3
SIREN ( sin )
512
512
Hidden Layer 4
SIREN ( sin )
512
512
Output Layer
Linear
512
1
Table 1: SIREN Decoder Architecture Details
Figure 5: Comparison of training and inference phases in the auto-decoder framework. (a) Training phase: learnable latent codes {zi} and shared decoder fθ are jointly optimized. Reconstruction loss (MSE) compares output V^i with ground truth Vi . (b) Inference phase: fixed latent codes zi∗ and trained decoder fθ∗ are used for efficient reconstruction without further optimization.
Parameter
Value
Latent dimension d
256
Hidden features
512
Hidden layers L
4
Batch size
32
Learning rate
2×10−4
Epochs
3000
Table 2: Training Hyperparameters
Geological Family
Description
Samples
FlatVel
Simple flat layer structures with constant velocities
200
CurveVel
Curved layer structures simulating folded geology
200
FlatFault
Flat layers with fault discontinuities
200
CurveFault
Curved layers with fault discontinuities
200
Style
Complex velocity patterns from natural images
200
Total
1000
Table 3: OpenFWI Dataset Composition
Property
Value
Total samples
1000
Grid size
70×70
Total points per sample
4,900
Value range (raw)
[1500, 4000] (approx.)
Value range (normalized)
[−1,1]
Compression ratio
19:1 (4,900 → 256)
Table 4: Dataset Statistics
Hardware
GPU
NVIDIA RTX 3080 (10GB)
CPU
Intel i9-10900K
RAM
32GB
Software
PyTorch version
1.12.0
CUDA version
11.6
Table 5: Experimental Configuration
Metric
Mean
Std
Max
Min
PSNR (dB)
32.47
2.31
38.92
26.14
SSIM
0.956
0.018
0.991
0.892
MSE
4.23e-4
1.89e-4
1.56e-3
8.92e-5
Table 6: Overall Reconstruction Metrics
Figure 6: Best reconstruction results for each geological family. Columns (left to right): FlatVel, CurveVel, FlatFault, CurveFault, Style. Rows (top to bottom): Ground truth, Reconstruction (PSNR in corner), Error map (max error in corner). The error maps show that reconstruction errors concentrate near sharp interfaces (faults), while smooth regions are well recovered.
Family
PSNR (dB)
SSIM
MSE
FlatVel
35.82 ± 1.24
0.978 ± 0.008
2.12e-4 ± 0.89e-4
CurveVel
33.45 ± 1.87
0.962 ± 0.012
3.45e-4 ± 1.23e-4
FlatFault
31.28 ± 2.15
0.948 ± 0.016
5.67e-4 ± 1.98e-4
CurveFault
30.56 ± 2.42
0.941 ± 0.019
6.89e-4 ± 2.34e-4
Style
31.24 ± 2.08
0.951 ± 0.015
5.02e-4 ± 1.76e-4
Table 7: Reconstruction Metrics per Geological Family
Figure 7: Reconstruction quality metrics (PSNR and SSIM) for each geological family. (a) PSNR values: FlatVel achieves highest PSNR (35.82 dB), followed by CurveVel (33.45 dB). Faulted structures show lower PSNR: FlatFault (31.28 dB), CurveFault (30.56 dB). Style achieves intermediate performance (31.24 dB). (b) SSIM values follow similar trend: FlatVel (0.978), CurveVel (0.962), FlatFault (0.948), CurveFault (0.941), Style (0.951). Error bars indicate standard deviation across 200 samples per family. Simple flat structures show highest quality and lowest variance, while faulted structures exhibit greater variance due to fault complexity.
Figure 8: Latent space interpolation between two velocity models from different geological families. Left: Sample A (FlatFault family, #A). Right: Sample B (CurveFault family, #B). Intermediate columns show linear interpolation at α=0.17,0.33,0.50,0.67,0.83 . The smooth transition in geological features demonstrates that the learned latent space captures meaningful semantic variations and enables continuous morphing between different structures.
α
MSE to A
MSE to B
0.00
0.00e+0
8.45e-3
0.17
2.34e-4
5.67e-3
0.33
8.92e-4
3.21e-3
0.50
1.56e-3
1.56e-3
0.67
3.21e-3
8.92e-4
0.83
5.67e-3
2.34e-4
Table 8: Interpolation Error Analysis
Figure 9: Zero-shot super-resolution results for sample #425 (Style family). Top row: full velocity fields at different resolutions (70×70, 140×140, 280×280). Bottom row: zoomed-in views of the region marked by yellow rectangle in GT. The 4× reconstruction (280×280) preserves sharp fault boundaries without additional training, demonstrating the resolution-agnostic nature of implicit neural representations.
Resolution
PSNR (dB)
SSIM
MSE
70 × 70 (1×)
32.47
0.956
4.23e-4
140 × 140 (2×)
31.82
0.948
5.12e-4
280 × 280 (4×)
30.95
0.937
6.78e-4
Table 9: Super-Resolution Quality Metrics
Method
Representation
Storage per Sample
PSNR (dB)
Raw grid
70×70 grid
4,900 floats
-
JPEG2000
Wavelet-based
500 bytes
28-31
InversionNet [ 35 ]
CNN features
1,024 features
29-33
COIN [ 31 ]
Separate MLP
50K params
30-35
Ours (SIREN auto-decoder)
256-dim latent
256 floats
32.47
Table 10: Comparison of Compression Methods
Dataset Size
Raw Grid
Ours (latents only)
Ours (total)
1,000 samples
4.9M floats
256K floats
1.30M floats
Table 11: Memory Requirements for Dataset Storage (Based on 1,000 Samples)
Implicit neural representations (INRs) model a signal as a continuous coordinate-to-value function. For terrain elevation data, this supports analytic derivatives, arbitrary-resolution decoding, and a smooth surface model of the underlying heightfield. However, fitting and storing a separate INR for every tile does not scale to large terrain datasets. Amortized neural representations reduce this cost with a shared network: a new tile is mapped to a compact per-tile payload, and a shared decoder reconstructs the heightfield from it. Most such methods are hypernetworks that predict the payload in a single forward pass, while others recover it through a short per-tile optimization. These methods were developed primarily for natural images, and their suitability for terrain heightfields remains unclear. We introduce a controlled benchmark on a 1 m/pixel terrain dataset and evaluate three representative methods under a unified protocol. Observing a clear cross-domain gap, we propose HUVR+SIREN, a hypernetwork that adapts the strongest benchmarked method (HUVR) by replacing its coordinate decoder with a smooth, analytically differentiable one. It attains the best height and derivative fidelity on the benchmark with no additional per-tile storage and lower decode cost, and tolerates aggressive post-training quantization with negligible quality loss, giving a compact terrain neural format. Ablations and diagnostics further identify which design choices transfer to terrain and show that the per-tile bottleneck is already near its useful limit, leaving the remaining gap in the shared hypernetwork's architectural design.
Implicit Neural Representation (INR) provides an effective approach for continuous signal modeling, but classical per-pixel inference results in quadratic growth in inference count, leading to dramatically increased computational costs in high-resolution application scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a patch-based approach that treats non-overlapping patches as fundamental processing units and predicts entire pixel patches in a single forward pass, significantly reducing the number of inference queries required. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose a hardware acceleration architecture on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform for the INR model, which features a configurable pipeline and supports dual-precision computation. Our patch-based INR achieves comparable reconstruction quality to pixel-level INR (34.97 dB PSNR with 2 x 2 patches) while reducing inference latency by 75% with only 0.6% parameter overhead.
Jiachen Ren, Wenyong Zhou, Taiqiang Wu +4
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Digital elevation models (DEMs) underpin terrain analysis in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but in their common raster form, they rely on interpolation for off-grid sampling and finite-difference operators for derivative-based analysis. Implicit neural representations (INRs) offer a continuous alternative, but prior terrain INRs lack explicit frequency control, neglect the gradient structure of terrain, and remain too large and costly to train for practical deployment. We present ImplicitTerrainV2, which advances terrain INRs toward a compact, efficient neural terrain data format by combining a spectral control mechanism with wavelet-guided spatial adaptivity, derivative-aware supervision, and post-training model compression. At its core, a wavelet complexity field (WCF) derives spatially-adaptive frequency masks from analytically computed wavelet coefficients, localizing high-frequency capacity to complex terrain regions. The same field guides complexity-aware adaptive sampling that concentrates training in high-complexity regions, while gradient matching applies extra supervision to enforce the smooth manifold structure of terrain DEMs for improved derivative fidelity. Post-training mixed-precision quantization and entropy coding reduce storage to 1.23 bpp with a 0.28 dB PSNR drop. On 50 Swiss terrain tiles, ImplicitTerrainV2 reaches 66.25 dB end-to-end PSNR, improving over the prior work by 5.70 dB while using 3.2x fewer parameters and training in 55 s per tile on a single GPU. Our compressed neural format is competitive with several established DEM codecs in rate-distortion performance, while additionally supporting off-grid point queries, closed-form derivative evaluation, and resolution-independent reconstruction, which may benefit many downstream GIS applications.