GeoSET: Generalist Foundation Model for SAR-to-EO Image Translation

arXiv:2609.37496 · cs.CV · Submitted 2026-09-26 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-09-26

Updated: 2026-09-26

Comments: Please visit our project page https://kaist-viclab.github.io/GeoSET_site/

Project page: https://kaist-viclab.github.io/GeoSET_site

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Paired synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical (EO) imagery is increasingly available across sensors, resolutions, and geographic regions.

Terminology

Abstract

Paired synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical (EO) imagery is increasingly available across sensors, resolutions, and geographic regions. Yet existing SAR-to-EO image translation (SET) methods are typically trained on a single, limited-scale dataset, producing models specialized to particular sensing conditions. We introduce GeoSET, the first generalist model for SET, built around a single pretrained parent that is adapted to downstream datasets under a common protocol. We curate over 3 million high-quality SAR--EO pairs from a collection of more than 10 million SAR observations, spanning diverse sensors, spatial resolutions, and ground sampling distances. To bridge the modality gap between SAR observations and a pretrained image generator, we develop a speckle-robust SAR encoder and pretrain the conditional generator on this heterogeneous corpus. The resulting parent supports efficient adaptation across downstream datasets through low-rank adaptation (LoRA), updating only 0.60% of the generator parameters and requiring approximately one hour per dataset. Across six downstream benchmarks, GeoSET achieves state-of-the-art results in FID and DISTS with full fine-tuning or LoRA, demonstrating effective transfer across heterogeneous SAR-EO domains.

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