CLIPPan: Adapting CLIP as A Supervisor for Unsupervised Pansharpening
This addresses the problem of unsupervised full-resolution pansharpening for remote sensing applications, offering a novel approach but with incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackles the domain adaptation challenge in pansharpening by proposing CLIPPan, an unsupervised framework that uses a fine-tuned CLIP model as a supervisor to train at full resolution without ground truth, achieving state-of-the-art spectral and spatial fidelity on real-world datasets.
Despite remarkable advancements in supervised pansharpening neural networks, these methods face domain adaptation challenges of resolution due to the intrinsic disparity between simulated reduced-resolution training data and real-world full-resolution scenarios.To bridge this gap, we propose an unsupervised pansharpening framework, CLIPPan, that enables model training at full resolution directly by taking CLIP, a visual-language model, as a supervisor. However, directly applying CLIP to supervise pansharpening remains challenging due to its inherent bias toward natural images and limited understanding of pansharpening tasks. Therefore, we first introduce a lightweight fine-tuning pipeline that adapts CLIP to recognize low-resolution multispectral, panchromatic, and high-resolution multispectral images, as well as to understand the pansharpening process. Then, building on the adapted CLIP, we formulate a novel \textit{loss integrating semantic language constraints}, which aligns image-level fusion transitions with protocol-aligned textual prompts (e.g., Wald's or Khan's descriptions), thus enabling CLIPPan to use language as a powerful supervisory signal and guide fusion learning without ground truth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLIPPan consistently improves spectral and spatial fidelity across various pansharpening backbones on real-world datasets, setting a new state of the art for unsupervised full-resolution pansharpening.