Fast Kernel-Space Diffusion for Remote Sensing Pansharpening
About
Pansharpening seeks to fuse high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) and low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) images into a single image with both fine spatial and rich spectral detail. Despite progress in deep learning-based approaches, existing methods often fail to capture global priors inherent in remote sensing data distributions. Diffusion-based models have recently emerged as promising solutions due to their powerful distribution mapping capabilities, however, they suffer from heavy inference latency. We introduce KSDiff, a fast kernel-space diffusion framework that generates convolutional kernels enriched with global context to enhance pansharpening quality and accelerate inference. Specifically, KSDiff constructs these kernels through the integration of a low-rank core tensor generator and a unified factor generator, orchestrated by a structure-aware multi-head attention mechanism. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy tailored for pansharpening, facilitating integration into existing pansharpening architectures. Experiments show that KSDiff achieves superior performance compared to recent promising methods, and with over $500 \times$ faster inference than diffusion-based pansharpening baselines. Ablation studies, visualizations and further evaluations substantiate the effectiveness of our approach. Code will be released upon possible acceptance.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pansharpening | QB (QuickBird) full-resolution (test) | Dx0.038 | 52 | |
| Pansharpening | GF2 full-resolution (test) | Dx0.0233 | 42 | |
| Pansharpening | WorldView-2 reduced-resolution (test) | SAM5.1944 | 20 | |
| Pansharpening | WV3 Reduced-Resolution | SAM2.8102 | 15 | |
| Pansharpening | WV3 full-resolution | Dλ0.021 | 15 | |
| Pansharpening | QuickBird (QB) reduced-resolution | SAM4.4747 | 15 |