A Variational Latent-Space Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Spectral Image Emulation

Synthetic spectral image generation is essential for remote sensing simulation and mission design, yet physically based radiative transfer models (RTMs) remain computationally expensive. Existing learning-based emulators reduce this cost, but are mostly deterministic parameter-to-spectrum regressors with limited spatial modeling and uncertainty information. We formulate spectral image emulation as a parameter-conditioned latent-variable problem and propose a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based framework combining nonlinear spectral-image representations, fast inference, and per-pixel uncertainty estimates. The framework is instantiated at spectrum and spatial--spectral levels through two-step VAE pretraining and latent mapping. We evaluate it on PROSAIL-simulated hyperspectral vegetation cubes (211 bands) and real Sentinel-3 OLCI multispectral ocean-colour imagery (21 bands) against classical regression emulators and a deep CNN baseline. Results show that no single architecture is optimal: pixel-to-pixel models perform best on controlled hyperspectral simulations, whereas a fully convolutional VAE is more robust on noisy real observations with missing or contaminated pixels. VAE-based emulators also achieve high throughput for large-scale generation. On Sentinel-3, the spatial--spectral VAE provides predictive intervals closer to empirical errors than pixel-wise neural and classical emulators, although absolute calibration remains incomplete. A look-up-table-based retrieval experiment further shows that reconstruction fidelity alone does not ensure reliable leaf area index and chlorophyll retrieval. Emulators should therefore be evaluated in representative remote-sensing end-use scenarios, not by reconstruction metrics alone.