arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Cross-modal learning for SAR target recognition using optical vision foundation models

The paper proposes a cross‑modal framework that uses a frozen DINOv3 optical vision foundation model to create class‑level prototypes for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition. By aligning SAR embeddings to these optical prototypes, the SAR model learns to classify SAR images without needing paired optical data. Experiments on the UNICORNv2 dataset show that this prototype alignment improves SAR classification accuracy compared to baseline methods and yields clearer class separation in the embedding space.

By Lucas Hirsch, James R. Hopgood, Javid Khan, Yoann Altmann, Mike E. Davies
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Bridging Modalities and Tasks: A Unified Hierarchical ViT for SAR-to-Optical Translation and Semantic Segmentation

The paper introduces BMT, a unified hierarchical Vision Transformer that jointly performs SAR-to-optical image translation and semantic segmentation. It incorporates a LocalViTBlock, an enhanced output module, a ControlNet-style conditional injection, and a bounded Kendall uncertainty weighting scheme to balance the two tasks. Experiments on paired and unpaired datasets demonstrate competitive performance in both translation quality and segmentation accuracy.

By Siyuan Liu, Xuze Zhang, Yongshun Wang, Licong Pan, Hang Liu, Huihui Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

ProSR: Semantic-Prototype-Guided Discrete Modeling for Physically Consistent SAR Super-Resolution

ProSR is a new method for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) super‑resolution that treats the task as a discrete token prediction problem in a quantized latent space. By mapping SAR signal features to discrete scattering primitives and using a self‑supervised backbone to extract label‑free semantic priors, ProSR preserves the impulsive, physically consistent scattering statistics of SAR images. The approach includes Semantic‑Aligned Detail Encoding and a Prototype‑Map‑Guided Attention mechanism, and it has been validated on a large‑scale 0.25 m resolution benchmark from the Umbra Open Dataset, achieving superior visual quality while maintaining essential scattering characteristics.

By Byoungwoo Kim, Munchurl Kim
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

Lightweight Adaptation of General-Purpose VLMs for Multispectral and SAR Image Understanding

The paper demonstrates a lightweight method to adapt general-purpose vision‑language models (VLMs) for multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image understanding. By rendering each observation as five optical views and one SAR view, naming them in the prompt, and applying LoRA to the language network and selected visual transformer blocks, the authors enable VLMs to process band composites, spectral indices, and radar backscatter without retraining a new foundation model. On a balanced six‑class land‑cover benchmark from BigEarthNet‑v2, the adapted Qwen3‑VL achieves a micro F1 score of 0.8275, and the same protocol improves four other VLMs and transfers to flood verification and captioning tasks.