Deep Learning of Radiometrical and Geometrical Sar Distorsions for Image Modality translations

Multimodal approaches for Earth Observations suffer from both the lack of interpretability of SAR images and the high sensitivity to meteorological conditions of optical images. Translation methods were implemented to solve them for specific tasks and areas. But these implementations lack of generalizability as they do not include samples with challenging characteristics. Firstly, this paper sums up the main problems that a general SAR to optical image translator should overcome. Then, a SAR Distorted Image to optical translator Network (SARDINet) alternating knowledgeable channel-wise spatial convolutions and cross-channel convolutions is implemented. It aims at solving a problem of major concern in remote sensing: translating layover disturbed SAR images into disturbance-free optical ones. SARDINet is trained through a classical and an adversarial framework and compared to cGAN and cycleGAN from the literature. Experimental results prove that adversarial approaches are more qualitative but worsen quantitative results.