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Record W4413478742 · doi:10.1017/eds.2025.10015

Discrete variational autoencoders for synthetic nighttime visible satellite imagery

2025· article· en· W4413478742 on OpenAlexafffund
Mickell D. Als, David Tomarov, Steve Easterbrook

Bibliographic record

VenueEnvironmental Data Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicAdvanced Image Fusion Techniques
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsSatelliteRemote sensingSatellite imageryComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceComputer visionMeteorologyGeographyPhysicsAstronomy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Visible satellite imagery (VIS) is essential for monitoring weather patterns and tracking ground surface changes associated with climate change. However, its availability is limited during nighttime. To address this limitation, we present a discrete variational autoencoder (VQVAE) method for translating infrared satellite imagery to VIS. This method departs from previous efforts that utilize a U-Net architecture. By removing the connections between corresponding layers of the encoder and decoder, the model learns a discrete and rich codebook of latent priors for the translation task. We train and test our model on mesoscale data from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) West Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) sensor, spanning 4 years (2019 to 2022) using the Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets (CGAN) framework. This work demonstrates the practical use of a VQVAE for meteorological satellite image translation. Our approach provides a modular framework for data compression and reconstruction, with a latent representation space specifically designed for handling meteorological satellite imagery.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.024

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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