To Remove or Not to Remove Clouds: A Comparative Analysis and Fusion of Raw SAR and Synthetic NDWI for Overcast Water Segmentation

arXiv:2608.17398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent clouds blind optical satellites during floods. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) penetrates clouds, its raw data is noisy and lacks clear contrast. To mitigate this, recent studies utilize deep learning models to translate SAR into cloud-free synthetic optical imagery for downstream tasks like water body segmentation. However, because raw SAR is the original source for both of these operations, a critical methodological dilemma arises...