Satellite image inpainting with deep generative adversarial neural networks

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of recovering lost or damaged satellite image pixels (gaps) caused by sensor processing errors or by natural phenomena like cloud presence. Such errors decrease our ability to monitor regions of interest and significantly increase the average revisit time for all satellites. This paper presents a novel neural system based on conditional deep generative adversarial networks (cGAN) optimized to fill satellite imagery gaps using surrounding pixel values and static high-resolution visual priors. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms traditional and neural network baselines. It achieves a normalized least absolute deviations error of (  &  decrease in error compared with the two baselines) and a mean squared error loss of  (  &  decrease in error) over the test set. The model can be deployed within a remote sensing data pipeline to reconstruct missing pixel measurements for near-real-time monitoring and inference purposes, thus empowering policymakers and users to make environmentally informed decisions.