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Main Authors: Hu, Yuyang, Lohit, Suhas, Kamilov, Ulugbek S., Marks, Tim K.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03607
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author Hu, Yuyang
Lohit, Suhas
Kamilov, Ulugbek S.
Marks, Tim K.
author_facet Hu, Yuyang
Lohit, Suhas
Kamilov, Ulugbek S.
Marks, Tim K.
contents Deep learning has achieved some success in addressing the challenge of cloud removal in optical satellite images, by fusing with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for cloud removal, delivering higher-quality estimation by sampling from cloud-free distributions, compared to earlier methods. However, diffusion models initiate sampling from pure Gaussian noise, which complicates the sampling trajectory and results in suboptimal performance. Also, current methods fall short in effectively fusing SAR and optical data. To address these limitations, we propose Diffusion Bridges for Cloud Removal, DB-CR, which directly bridges between the cloudy and cloud-free image distributions. In addition, we propose a novel multimodal diffusion bridge architecture with a two-branch backbone for multimodal image restoration, incorporating an efficient backbone and dedicated cross-modality fusion blocks to effectively extract and fuse features from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images. By formulating cloud removal as a diffusion-bridge problem and leveraging this tailored architecture, DB-CR achieves high-fidelity results while being computationally efficient. We evaluated DB-CR on the SEN12MS-CR cloud-removal dataset, demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_03607
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Diffusion Bridge with Attention-Based SAR Fusion for Satellite Image Cloud Removal
Hu, Yuyang
Lohit, Suhas
Kamilov, Ulugbek S.
Marks, Tim K.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep learning has achieved some success in addressing the challenge of cloud removal in optical satellite images, by fusing with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for cloud removal, delivering higher-quality estimation by sampling from cloud-free distributions, compared to earlier methods. However, diffusion models initiate sampling from pure Gaussian noise, which complicates the sampling trajectory and results in suboptimal performance. Also, current methods fall short in effectively fusing SAR and optical data. To address these limitations, we propose Diffusion Bridges for Cloud Removal, DB-CR, which directly bridges between the cloudy and cloud-free image distributions. In addition, we propose a novel multimodal diffusion bridge architecture with a two-branch backbone for multimodal image restoration, incorporating an efficient backbone and dedicated cross-modality fusion blocks to effectively extract and fuse features from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images. By formulating cloud removal as a diffusion-bridge problem and leveraging this tailored architecture, DB-CR achieves high-fidelity results while being computationally efficient. We evaluated DB-CR on the SEN12MS-CR cloud-removal dataset, demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art results.
title Multimodal Diffusion Bridge with Attention-Based SAR Fusion for Satellite Image Cloud Removal
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03607