Optical satellite images are a critical data source; however, cloud cover often compromises their quality, hindering image applications and analysis. Consequently, effectively removing clouds from optical satellite images has emerged as a prominent research direction. While recent advancements in cloud removal primarily rely on generative adversarial networks, which may yield suboptimal image quality, diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in diverse image-generation tasks, showcasing their potential in addressing this challenge. This paper presents a novel framework called DiffCR, which leverages conditional guided diffusion with deep convolutional networks for high-performance cloud removal for optical satellite imagery. Specifically, we introduce a decoupled encoder for conditional image feature extraction, providing a robust color representation to ensure the close similarity of appearance information between the conditional input and the synthesized output. Moreover, we propose a novel and efficient time and condition fusion block within the cloud removal model to accurately simulate the correspondence between the appearance in the conditional image and the target image at a low computational cost. Extensive experimental evaluations on two commonly used benchmark datasets demonstrate that DiffCR consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on all metrics, with parameter and computational complexities amounting to only 5.1% and 5.4%, respectively, of those previous best methods. The source code, pre-trained models, and all the experimental results will be publicly available at https://github.com/XavierJiezou/DiffCR upon the paper's acceptance of this work.
deSEO: Physics-Aware Dataset Creation for High-Resolution Satellite Image Shadow Removal
Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；Friedrich Schiller University of Jena（耶拿弗里德里希·席勒大学）
A Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Cross-Modal Geo-Localization
The Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom（人工智能研究所（TeleAI），中国电信）；East China Normal University（东华师范大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）
