Deep priors for satellite image restoration with accurate uncertainties

Satellite optical images, upon their on-ground receipt, offer a distorted view of the observed scene. Their restoration, including denoising, deblurring, and sometimes super-resolution, is required before their exploitation. Moreover, quantifying the uncertainties related to this restoration helps to reduce the risks of misinterpreting the image content. Deep learning methods are now state-of-the-art for satellite image restoration. Among them, direct inversion methods train a specific network for each sensor, and generally provide a point estimation of the restored image without the associated uncertainties. Alternatively, deep regularization (DR) methods learn a deep prior on target images before plugging it, as the regularization term, into a model-based optimization scheme. This allows for restoring images from several sensors with a single network and possibly for estimating associated uncertainties. In this paper, we introduce VBLE-xz, a DR method that solves the inverse problem in the latent space of a variational compressive autoencoder (CAE). We adapt the regularization strength by modulating the bitrate of the trained CAE with a training-free approach. Then, VBLE-xz estimates relevant uncertainties jointly in the latent and in the image spaces by sampling an explicit posterior estimated within variational inference. This enables fast posterior sampling, unlike state-of-the-art DR methods that use Markov chains or diffusion-based approaches. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on very high-resolution simulated and real Pléiades images, asserting the performance, robustness and scalability of the proposed method. They demonstrate that VBLE-xz represents a compelling alternative to direct inversion methods when uncertainty quantification is required. The code associated to this paper is available in https://github.com/MaudBqrd/VBLExz.