From Spaceborne to Airborne: SAR Image Synthesis Using Foundation Models for Multi-Scale Adaptation

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Main Authors: Debuysere, Solene, Trouve, Nicolas, Letheule, Nathan, Leveque, Olivier, Colin, Elise
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Debuysere, Solene
Trouve, Nicolas
Letheule, Nathan
Leveque, Olivier
Colin, Elise
author_facet Debuysere, Solene
Trouve, Nicolas
Letheule, Nathan
Leveque, Olivier
Colin, Elise
contents The availability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite imagery has increased considerably in recent years, with datasets commercially available. However, the acquisition of high-resolution SAR images in airborne configurations, remains costly and limited. Thus, the lack of open source, well-labeled, or easily exploitable SAR text-image datasets is a barrier to the use of existing foundation models in remote sensing applications. In this context, synthetic image generation is a promising solution to augment this scarce data, enabling a broader range of applications. Leveraging over 15 years of ONERA's extensive archival airborn data from acquisition campaigns, we created a comprehensive training dataset of 110 thousands SAR images to exploit a 3.5 billion parameters pre-trained latent diffusion model \cite{Baqu2019SethiR}. In this work, we present a novel approach utilizing spatial conditioning techniques within a foundation model to transform satellite SAR imagery into airborne SAR representations. Additionally, we demonstrate that our pipeline is effective for bridging the realism of simulated images generated by ONERA's physics-based simulator EMPRISE \cite{empriseem_ai_images}. Our method explores a key application of AI in advancing SAR imaging technology. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce this approach in the literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Spaceborne to Airborne: SAR Image Synthesis Using Foundation Models for Multi-Scale Adaptation
Debuysere, Solene
Trouve, Nicolas
Letheule, Nathan
Leveque, Olivier
Colin, Elise
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The availability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite imagery has increased considerably in recent years, with datasets commercially available. However, the acquisition of high-resolution SAR images in airborne configurations, remains costly and limited. Thus, the lack of open source, well-labeled, or easily exploitable SAR text-image datasets is a barrier to the use of existing foundation models in remote sensing applications. In this context, synthetic image generation is a promising solution to augment this scarce data, enabling a broader range of applications. Leveraging over 15 years of ONERA's extensive archival airborn data from acquisition campaigns, we created a comprehensive training dataset of 110 thousands SAR images to exploit a 3.5 billion parameters pre-trained latent diffusion model \cite{Baqu2019SethiR}. In this work, we present a novel approach utilizing spatial conditioning techniques within a foundation model to transform satellite SAR imagery into airborne SAR representations. Additionally, we demonstrate that our pipeline is effective for bridging the realism of simulated images generated by ONERA's physics-based simulator EMPRISE \cite{empriseem_ai_images}. Our method explores a key application of AI in advancing SAR imaging technology. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce this approach in the literature.
title From Spaceborne to Airborne: SAR Image Synthesis Using Foundation Models for Multi-Scale Adaptation
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03844