# Cross-Sensor SAR Data Generation Using Diffusion Models and Feature Migration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28922/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 12 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [SimpleAR: Pushing the Frontier of Autoregressive Visual Generation through Pretraining, SFT, and RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11455/) (2025)
- [The SEN1-2 Dataset for Deep Learning in SAR-Optical Data Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01569/) (2018)
- [DiffDet4SAR: Diffusion-based Aircraft Target Detection Network for SAR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03595/) (2024)
- [SAR Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07776/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Different synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors vary significantly in resolution, polarization modes, and frequency bands, making it difficult to directly apply existing models to newly launched SAR satellites. These new systems require large amounts of labeled data for model retraining, but collecting sufficient data in a short time is often infeasible. To address this contradiction, this paper proposes a data generation and transfer framework, integrating a stable diffusion model with attention distillation, that leverages historical SAR data to synthesize training data tailored to the unique characteristics of new SAR systems. Specifically, we fine-tune the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules within the multimodal diffusion transformer (MM-DiT) architecture to enable class-controllable SAR image generation guided by textual prompts. To ensure that the generated images reflect the statistical properties and imaging characteristics of the target SAR system, we further introduce an attention distillation mechanism that transfers sensor-specific features, such as spatial texture, speckle distribution, and structural patterns, from real target-domain data to the generative model. Extensive experiments on multi-class aircraft target datasets from two real spaceborne SAR systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in alleviating data scarcity and supporting cross-sensor remote sensing applications.