2024/10/02 by Alejandro Castañeda Garcia, Garcia, Alejandro Castañeda, Jan van Gemert +5 · 4 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference #Model Reduction and Neural Networks #Neural Networks and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.01376
openalex publication_date 2024/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Extracting physical dynamical system parameters from recorded observations is key in natural science. Current methods for automatic parameter estimation from video train supervised deep networks on large datasets. Such datasets require labels, which are difficult to acquire. While some unsupervised techniques--which depend on frame prediction--exist, they suffer from long training times, initialization instabilities, only consider motion-based dynamical systems, and are evaluated mainly on synthetic data. In this work, we propose an unsupervised method to estimate the physical parameters of known, continuous governing equations from single videos suitable for different dynamical systems beyond motion and robust to initialization. Moreover, we remove the need for frame prediction by implementing a KL-divergence-based loss function in the latent space, which avoids convergence to trivial solutions and reduces model size and compute. We first evaluate our model on synthetic data, as commonly done. After which, we take the field closer to reality by recording Delfys75: our own real-world dataset of 75 videos for five different types of dynamical systems to evaluate our method and others. Our method compares favorably to others. %, yet, and real-world video datasets and demonstrate improved parameter estimation accuracy compared to existing methods. Code and data are available online:https://github.com/Alejandro-neuro/Learningphysicsfromvideo.