Super-Resolution Residual U-Net Model for the Reconstruction of Limited-Data Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Tomography

[Image: see text] Resolution is an important index for evaluating the reconstruction performance of temperature distributions in a combustion environment, and a higher resolution is necessary to obtain more precise combustion diagnoses. Tunable diode laser absorption tomography (TDLAT) has proven to be a powerful combustion diagnosis method for efficient detection. However, restricted by the line-of-sight (LOS) measurement, the reconstruction resolution of TDLAT was dependent on the size of the detection data, which made it difficult to obtain sufficient data for extreme environmental measurements. This severely limits the development of TDLAT in combustion diagnosis. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a super-resolution reconstruction method based on the super-resolution residual U-Net (SRResUNet) to improve the reconstruction resolution using a software method that could take full advantage of residual networks and U-Net to extract the deep features from the limited data of TDLAT to reconstruct the temperature distribution efficiently. A simulation study was conducted to investigate how the parameters would affect the performance of the super-resolution model and to optimize the reconstruction. The results show that our SRResUNet model can effectively improve the accuracy of reconstruction with super-resolution, with good antinoise performance, with the errors of 2-, 4-, and 8-times super-resolution reconstructions of approximately 5.3, 7.4, and 9.7%, respectively. The successful demonstration of SRResUNet in this work indicates the possible applications of other deep learning methods, such as enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial networks (ESRGANs) for limited-data TDLAT.