ReflectGAN: Modeling Vegetation Effects for Soil Carbon Estimation from Satellite Imagery

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a critical indicator of soil health, but its accurate estimation from satellite imagery is hindered in vegetated regions due to spectral contamination from plant cover, which obscures soil reflectance and reduces model reliability. This study proposes the Reflectance Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (ReflectGAN), a novel paired GAN-based framework designed to reconstruct accurate bare soil reflectance from vegetated soil satellite observations. By learning the spectral transformation between vegetated and bare soil reflectance, ReflectGAN facilitates more precise SOC estimation under mixed land cover conditions. Using the LUCAS 2018 dataset and corresponding Landsat 8 imagery, we trained multiple learning-based models on both original and ReflectGAN-reconstructed reflectance inputs. Models trained on ReflectGAN outputs consistently outperformed those using existing vegetation correction methods. For example, the best-performing model (RF) achieved an R2 of 0.54, RMSE of 3.95, and RPD of 2.07 when applied to the ReflectGAN-generated signals, representing a 35% increase in R2, a 43% reduction in RMSE, and a 43% improvement in RPD compared to the best existing method (PMM-SU). The performance of the models with ReflectGAN is also better compared to their counterparts when applied to another dataset, i.e., Sentinel-2 imagery. These findings demonstrate the potential of ReflectGAN to improve SOC estimation accuracy in vegetated landscapes, supporting more reliable soil monitoring.