Learned wave-based imaging - variational inference at scale

High dimensionality, complex physics, and lack of access to the ground truth rank medical ultrasound and seismic imaging amongst the most challenging problems in the computational imaging sciences. If these challenges were not bad enough, modern applications of computational imaging increasingly call for the assessment of uncertainty on the image itself and on subsequent tasks. During this talk, I will show how recent developments in Normalizing Flows, a new type of invertible neural networks, can be used to cast wave-based imaging into a scalable Bayesian framework. Contrary to conventional methods, where sample images are drawn from the posterior distribution during inversion, our approach trains Normalizing Flows capable of generating samples from the posterior. Aside from greatly reducing the computational cost, this approach gives us access to the image itself (via Maximum a posteriori or mean estimation) and its multidimensional statistical distribution including its pointwise variance.