SARMAE: Masked Autoencoder for SAR Representation Learning

Danxu Liu, Di Wang, Hebaixu Wang, Haoyang Chen, Wentao Jiang, Yilin Cheng, Haonan Guo, Wei Cui, Jing Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 6496-6507

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery plays a critical role in all-weather, day-and-night remote sensing applications. However, existing SAR-oriented deep learning is constrained by data scarcity, while the physically grounded speckle noise in SAR imagery further hampers fine-grained semantic representation learning. To address these challenges, we propose SARMAE, a Noise-Aware Masked Autoencoder for self-supervised SAR representation learning. Specifically, we construct SAR-1M, the first million-scale SAR dataset, with additional paired optical images, to enable large-scale pre-training. Building upon this, we design Speckle-Aware Representation Enhancement (SARE), which injects SAR-specific speckle noise into Masked Autoencoder to facilitate noise-aware and robust representation learning. Furthermore, we introduce Semantic Anchor Representation Constraint (SARC), which leverages paired optical priors to align SAR features and ensure semantic consistency. Extensive experiments across multiple SAR datasets demonstrate that SARMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/MiliLab/SARMAE.