SVH-BD : Synthetic Vegetation Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset for Emulation of Remote Sensing Images

This dataset provides a large collection of 10,915 synthetic hyperspectral image cubes paired with pixel-level vegetation trait maps, designed to support research in radiative transfer emulation, vegetation trait retrieval, and uncertainty quantification. Each hyperspectral cube contains 211 bands spanning 400--2500 nm at 10 nm resolution and a fixed spatial layout of 64 \times 64 pixels, offering continuous simulated surface reflectance spectra suitable for emulator development and machine-learning tasks requiring high spectral detail. Vegetation traits were derived by inverting Sentinel-2 Level-2A surface reflectance using a PROSAIL-based lookup-table approach, followed by forward PROSAIL simulations to generate hyperspectral reflectance under physically consistent canopy and illumination conditions. The dataset covers four ecologically diverse regions -- East Africa, Northern France, Eastern India, and Southern Spain -- and includes 5th and 95th percentile uncertainty maps as well as Sentinel-2 scene classification layers. This resource enables benchmarking of inversion methods, development of fast radiative transfer emulators, and studies of spectral--biophysical relationships under controlled yet realistic environmental variability.

A Latent Representation Learning Framework for Hyperspectral Image Emulation in Remote Sensing

Synthetic hyperspectral image (HSI) generation is essential for large-scale simulation, algorithm development, and mission design, yet traditional radiative transfer models remain computationally expensive and often limited to spectrum-level outputs. In this work, we propose a latent representation-based framework for hyperspectral emulation that learns a latent generative representation of hyperspectral data. The proposed approach supports both spectrum-level and spatial-spectral emulation and can be trained either in a direct one-step formulation or in a two-step strategy that couples variational autoencoder (VAE) pretraining with parameter-to-latent interpolation. Experiments on PROSAIL-simulated vegetation data and Sentinel-3 OLCI imagery demonstrate that the method outperforms classical regression-based emulators in reconstruction accuracy, spectral fidelity, and robustness to real-world spatial variability. We further show that emulated HSIs preserve performance in downstream biophysical parameter retrieval, highlighting the practical relevance of emulated data for remote sensing applications.