Synthetic Glacier SAR Image Generation from Arbitrary Masks Using Pix2Pix Algorithm

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using Pix2Pix cGANs to generate synthetic SAR images from segmentation masks, aiming to augment training data for remote sensing tasks involving glaciers.

Contribution

The work demonstrates that Pix2Pix can effectively synthesize realistic glacier SAR images from masks, reducing the need for extensive labeled datasets.

Findings

Synthesizes convincing glacier SAR images

Achieves promising qualitative results

Provides quantitative validation of the approach

Abstract

Supervised machine learning requires a large amount of labeled data to achieve proper test results. However, generating accurately labeled segmentation maps on remote sensing imagery, including images from synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is tedious and highly subjective. In this work, we propose to alleviate the issue of limited training data by generating synthetic SAR images with the pix2pix algorithm. This algorithm uses conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) to generate an artificial image while preserving the structure of the input. In our case, the input is a segmentation mask, from which a corresponding synthetic SAR image is generated. We present different models, perform a comparative study and demonstrate that this approach synthesizes convincing glaciers in SAR images with promising qualitative and quantitative results.