# SARFormer -- An Acquisition Parameter Aware Vision Transformer for Synthetic Aperture Radar Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08441 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08441/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08051/) (2022)
- [SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10115/) (2023)
- [CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00566/) (2023)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18660/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Single Image Depth Estimation: Toward Higher Resolution Maps with Accurate Object Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08673/) (2018)
- [SpaceNet 6: Multi-Sensor All Weather Mapping Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06500/) (2020)
- [Predicting Gradient is Better: Exploring Self-Supervised Learning for SAR ATR with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15153/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Joint SAR-optical Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05381/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models and Semi-Supervised Learners Benefit Mutually with Few Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10586/) (2023)
- [SenPa-MAE: Sensor Parameter Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multi-Satellite Self-Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11000/) (2024)
- [Deep-Learning-Based Single-Image Height Reconstruction from Very-High-Resolution SAR Intensity Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02061/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Enhanced LULC Segmentation via Lightweight Model Refinements on ALOS-2 SAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15705/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This manuscript introduces SARFormer, a modified Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture designed for processing one or multiple synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Given the complex image geometry of SAR data, we propose an acquisition parameter encoding module that significantly guides the learning process, especially in the case of multiple images, leading to improved performance on downstream tasks. We further explore self-supervised pre-training, conduct experiments with limited labeled data, and benchmark our contribution and adaptations thoroughly in ablation experiments against a baseline, where the model is tested on tasks such as height reconstruction and segmentation. Our approach achieves up to 17% improvement in terms of RMSE over baseline models