Unpaired Object-Level SAR-to-Optical Image Translation for Aircraft with Keypoints-Guided Diffusion Models

Abstract: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery provides all-weather, all-day, and high-resolution imaging capabilities but its unique imaging mechanism makes interpretation heavily reliant on expert knowledge, limiting interpretability, especially in complex target tasks. Translating SAR images into optical images is a promising solution to enhance interpretation and support downstream tasks. Most existing research focuses on scene-level translation, with limited work on object-level translation due to the scarcity of paired data and the challenge of accurately preserving contour and texture details. To address these issues, this study proposes a keypoint-guided diffusion model (KeypointDiff) for SAR-to-optical image translation of unpaired aircraft targets. This framework introduces supervision on target class and azimuth angle via keypoints, along with a training strategy for unpaired data. Based on the classifier-free guidance diffusion architecture, a class-angle guidance module (CAGM) is designed to integrate class and angle information into the diffusion generation process. Furthermore, adversarial loss and consistency loss are employed to improve image fidelity and detail quality, tailored for aircraft targets. During sampling, aided by a pre-trained keypoint detector, the model eliminates the requirement for manually labeled class and azimuth information, enabling automated SAR-to-optical translation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches across multiple metrics, providing an efficient and effective solution for object-level SAR-to-optical translation and downstream tasks. Moreover, the method exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to untrained aircraft types with the assistance of the keypoint detector.