Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery generation is essential for deepening the study of scattering mechanisms, establishing trustworthy electromagnetic scene models, and fundamentally alleviating the data scarcity bottleneck that constrains development in this field. However, existing methods find it difficult to simultaneously ensure high fidelity in both global geospatial semantics and microscopic scattering mechanisms, resulting in severe challenges for global generation. To address this, we propose HuiYanEarth-SAR, the first foundational SAR imagery generation model based on AlphaEarth and integrated scattering mechanisms. By injecting geospatial priors to control macroscopic structures and utilizing implicit scattering characteristic modeling to ensure the authenticity of microscopic textures, we achieve the capability of generating high-fidelity SAR images for global locations solely based on geographic coordinates. This study not only constructs an efficient SAR scene simulator but also establishes a bridge connecting geography, scatter mechanism, and artificial intelligence from a methodological standpoint. It advances SAR research by expanding the paradigm from perception and understanding to simulation and creation, providing key technical support for constructing a high-confidence digital twin of the Earth.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: (a) We propose HuiYanEarth-SAR, the first generative foundation model conditioned on both geophysical priors and SAR scattering mechanism. The model only takes the geographic coordinates as input with low cost, ultimately generating high-fidelity SAR images that are strictly aligned with the input conditions and physically consistent. (b) HuiYanEarth-SAR shows powerful capabilities in generating global, high-fidelity SAR images. Code is available at https://github.com/JoyeZLearning/HuiYanEarth-SAR .
Fig. 2: Simplified schematic diagram of generation process.
Fig. 3: Global diverse scene images generated by HuiYanEarth-SAR . (a) the optical reference image, (b) the real Sentinel-1 SAR image, and (c) the SAR image generated by our model under the same geographic coordinates. (d)-(f) show the visualization of the 2nd, 7th, and 12th dimensions of the AlphaEarth 64-dimensional embedding vector used in the input conditions, reflecting geographical semantic information at different levels.
Fig. 4: Cross-continental multi-regional images generated by HuiYanEarth-SAR and their style consistency. Six representative locations are selected: (a) Sichuan China, (b) Tokyo Japan (Asia), (c) Rotterdam Netherlands, (d) Venice Italy (Europe), (e) New York USA, and (f) Amazon Brazil (Americas). For each column, from top to bottom, the images show the optical reference, the real SAR image, and the SAR image generated by our model.
Fig. 5: Comparison between (a) HuiYanEarth-SAR and other text-to-image models, including (b) GPT-4V, (c) Stable Diffusion, (d) LibLib F1, (e) Seedream, and (f) Jimeng. The prompt words given to these models are all the same. Taking mountains as an example, the text prompts are givens as:”A 10-meter resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image of mountainous terrain. The image should show bright slopes facing the radar and dark slopes facing away due to layover and shadowing effects. The image has speckle noise and is in grayscale.”
Fig. 6: Visual comparison of the core module ablation study. The blue bounding boxes highlight strong scatterers (e.g., bridges, large buildings). The complete model (c) accurately reconstructs these bright regions, whereas (d) appears significantly dimmer and blurred. The yellow circles indicate point targets, which are clearly visible in (c) but smoothed out or missing in (d). Column (e) demonstrates that the geospatial embedding is the fundamental prerequisite for generating valid imagery.
Methods
Metrics
AlphaEarth
Scattering
Mean/Std
FSIM ↑
SSIM ↑
Embedding
Mechanism
Similarity ↓
×
×
-
-
-
×
√
-
-
-
√
×
0.2028/0.0829
0.5693
0.3976
√
√
0.1752/0.0070
0.6781
0.5625
TABLE I: Ablation study results of core modules. Mean/Std Similarity measures radiometric distribution consistency between generated and real images. FSIM and SSIM assess structural similarity.
Level
Personnel
Professional
Experience
Head-
Type
Background
(Years)
count
L1
Novice
with SAR basics
1-3
18
L2
Familiar
with SAR processing
3–5
4
experience
L3
Expert
SAR image interpreters
≥ 5
2
Total
-
-
-
24
TABLE II: Participant information for the human visual evaluation.
Fig. 7: Hierarchical human visual evaluation results. (a) Misjudgment rate. (b) Quality score. (c) Confidence. L1/L2/L3 denote novice, familiar, and expert groups, respectively. The results demonstrate that HuiYanEarth-SAR successfully achieves cross-level visual deception. The retention of approximately 35% misjudgment even among experts proves that its generation quality approaches the limits of human visual discrimination.
Methods
Training Data
Accuracy
VGG16
Real Data
91.26
Augment Data
95.37
ResNet18
Real Data
92.35
Augment Data
96.47
ResNet34
Real Data
92.55
Augment Data
96.79
TABLE III: Accuracy of the SAR scene classification task w/ and w/o augmentation.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image generation can mitigate data scarcity, but controllablegeneration under sparse observation angles remains difficult. Recent SAR generative studies im-prove texture realism, yet explicit geometry-aware control is still limited. This paper studiesthe focused and verifiable setting of intermediate-azimuth completion: 3D-model-derived geo-metric priors guide a diffusion model to synthesize the views missing from sparse-angle trainingdata. GeoDiff-SAR constructs a lightweight multi-bounce ray-tracing prior, encodes the result-ing point cloud, and fuses it with text conditioning while adapting Stable Diffusion 3.5 Mediumthrough low-rank adaptation. On a real four-category aircraft dataset, GeoDiff-SAR reaches anSSIM of 0.812 and azimuth consistency of 0.940, compared with 0.738 and 0.782 for the text-conditioned SD3.5 Medium baseline. The same sparse-angle protocol on five MSTAR vehicleclasses yields an SSIM of 0.878 and azimuth consistency of 0.917. These results support theconclusion that a lightweight 3D geometric prior improves viewpoint adherence for controllableSAR generation; it is intended as generation guidance rather than high-fidelity electromagneticreconstruction.
Fan Zhang, Xuanting Wu, Fei Ma +2
College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China · 2Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) enables global, all-weather earth observation. However, owing to diverse imaging mechanisms, domain shifts across sensors and regions severely hinder its semantic generalization. To address this, we present CrossEarth-SAR, the first billion-scale SAR vision foundation model built upon a novel physics-guided sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture incorporating physical descriptors, explicitly designed for cross-domain semantic segmentation. To facilitate large-scale pre-training, we develop CrossEarth-SAR-200K, a weakly and fully supervised dataset that unifies public and private SAR imagery. We also introduce a benchmark suite comprising 22 sub-benchmarks across 8 distinct domain gaps, establishing the first unified standard for domain generalization semantic segmentation on SAR imagery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CrossEarth-SAR achieves state-of-the-art results on 20 benchmarks, surpassing previous methods by over 10% mIoU on some benchmarks under multi-gap transfer. All code, benchmark and datasets will be publicly available.
Ziqi Ye, Ziyang Gong, Ning Liao +10
Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +7
Research on the intelligent interpretation of all-weather, all-time Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is crucial for advancing remote sensing applications. In recent years, although Visual Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong open-world understanding capabilities on RGB images, their performance is severely limited when directly applied to the SAR field due to the complexity of the imaging mechanism, sensitivity to scattering features, and the scarcity of high-quality text corpora. To systematically address this issue, we constructed the inaugural SAR Image-Text-AlphaEarth feature triplet dataset and developed FUSAR-GPT, a VLM specifically for SAR. FUSAR-GPT innovatively introduces a geospatial baseline model as a 'world knowledge' prior and embeds multi-source remote-sensing temporal features into the model's visual backbone via 'spatiotemporal anchors', enabling dynamic compensation for the sparse representation of targets in SAR images. Furthermore, we designed a two-stage SFT strategy to decouple the knowledge injection and task execution of large models. The spatiotemporal feature embedding and the two-stage decoupling paradigm enable FUSAR-GPT to achieve state-of-the-art performance across several typical remote sensing visual-language benchmark tests, significantly outperforming mainstream baseline models by over 10%.
Xiaokun Zhang, Yi Yang, Ziqi Ye +6
Discipline and Technology Center of Microwave Vision Intelligent Sensing, Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute