Optimizing Vertical Ionogram Reconstruction: Low Cost and High Quality
with a Practical Pipeline
Abstract
The ionosphere profoundly impacts our daily lives, with ionograms
serving as essential tools for assessing its state. However, due to the
ionosphere’s unstable nature, these ionograms are often complex, highly
variable, and plagued by various forms of noise and signal interference.
While existing methods for ionogram analysis have focused on technical
and model innovations, they have largely ignored the importance of
improving the quality of the ionograms themselves. The basic principle
”Quality in, quality out” aptly describes this situation: the quality of
the input ionograms fundamentally limits the best performance of any
analysis. By enhancing data quality, we can boost the potential of
analytic methods. To this end, we define ionogram reconstruction as a
process that includes denoising, enhancing weak signals, and connecting
interrupted signals. We present a low-cost and high-quality ionogram
reconstruction pipeline, meticulously tailored in its training
strategies, model architecture, and loss functions to align with the
characteristics of ionograms. Key innovations include the use of
semi-supervised learning to reduce manual labeling costs, the invention
of the Tanh Valve and External Residual Connection mechanisms to speed
up model convergence, and the creation of a loss function with a
tracking mechanism to shift model focus. Experimental results confirm
that our pipeline is exceptionally well-suited for ionogram
reconstruction, with every design choice proving indispensable.