Gramian angular fields for leveraging pretrained computer vision models with anomalous diffusion trajectories

Anomalous diffusion is present at all scales, from atomic to large ones. Some exemplary systems are ultracold atoms, telomeres in the nucleus of cells, moisture transport in cement-based materials, arthropods' free movement, and birds' migration patterns. The characterization of the diffusion gives critical information about the dynamics of these systems and provides an interdisciplinary framework with which to study diffusive transport. Thus, the problem of identifying underlying diffusive regimes and inferring the anomalous diffusion exponent α with high confidence is critical to physics, chemistry, biology, and ecology. Classification and analysis of raw trajectories combining machine learning techniques with statistics extracted from them have widely been studied in the Anomalous Diffusion Challenge [Muñoz-Gil et al., Nat. Commun. 12, 6253 (2021)2041-172310.1038/s41467-021-26320-w]. Here we present a new data-driven method for working with diffusive trajectories. This method utilizes Gramian angular fields (GAF) to encode one-dimensional trajectories as images (Gramian matrices), while preserving their spatiotemporal structure for input to computer-vision models. This allows us to leverage two well-established pretrained computer-vision models, ResNet and MobileNet, to characterize the underlying diffusive regime and infer the anomalous diffusion exponent α. Short raw trajectories of lengths between 10 and 50 are commonly encountered in single-particle tracking experiments and are the most difficult ones to characterize. We show that GAF images can outperform the current state-of-the-art while increasing accessibility to machine learning methods in an applied setting.