Neutrino Fingerprints: Image-Based Encodings of IceCube Events for CNN Direction Reconstruction

Reconstructing the direction of incoming neutrinos in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is an important problem in astrophysics. The public IceCube--Neutrinos in Deep Ice Kaggle competition provided 140 million simulated events to benchmark reconstruction techniques. To address this challenge from a novel perspective we introduce neutrino fingerprints compact 72 × 72 × 3 images in which each pixel represents a single detector, with pulse timing and charge statistics encoded as color channels. This representation transforms sparse, irregular pulse data into dense images suitable for convolutional processing. Our ResNet18 model achieves a mean angular error of 1.10 rad, indicating that convolutional networks trained on fingerprints rival more complex architectures while offering an effective, interpretable baseline for IceCube event reconstruction.