Data Augmentation in Earth Observation: A Diffusion Model Approach

Abstract: High-quality Earth Observation (EO) imagery is essential for accurate analysis and informed decision making across sectors. However, data scarcity caused by atmospheric conditions, seasonal variations, and limited geographical coverage hinders the effective application of AI in EO. Traditional data augmentation techniques, which rely on basic parameterized image transformations, often fail to introduce sufficient diversity across key semantic axes. These axes include natural changes such as snow and floods, human impacts like urbanization and roads, and disasters such as wildfires and storms, which limits the accuracy of AI models in EO applications. To address this, we propose a four-stage data augmentation approach that integrates diffusion models to enhance semantic diversity. Our method employs meta-prompts for instruction generation, vision-LLMs for rich captioning, EO-specific diffusion model fine-tuning, and iterative data augmentation. Extensive experiments using four augmentation techniques demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms established methods, generating semantically diverse EO images and improving AI model performance.