SWIFT: A General Sensitive Weight Identification Framework for Fast Sensor-Transfer Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to fuse high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images with low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) images to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved promising performance, they generally suffer from severe performance degradation when applied to data from unseen sensors. Adapting these models through full-scale retraining or designing more complex architectures is often prohibitively expensive and impractical for real-world deployment. To address this critical challenge, we propose a fast and general-purpose framework for cross-sensor adaptation, SWIFT (Sensitive Weight Identification for Fast Transfer). Specifically, SWIFT employs an unsupervised sampling strategy based on data manifold structures to balance sample selection while mitigating the bias of traditional Farthest Point Sampling, efficiently selecting only 3\% of the most informative samples from the target domain. This subset is then used to probe a source-domain pre-trained model by analyzing the gradient behavior of its parameters, allowing for the quick identification and subsequent update of only the weight subset most sensitive to the domain shift. As a plug-and-play framework, SWIFT can be applied to various existing pansharpening models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWIFT reduces the adaptation time from hours to approximately one minute on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU. The adapted models not only substantially outperform direct-transfer baselines but also achieve performance competitive with, and in some cases superior to, full retraining, establishing a new state-of-the-art on cross-sensor pansharpening tasks for the WorldView-2 and QuickBird datasets.

CAT: A Conditional Adaptation Tailor for Efficient and Effective Instance-Specific Pansharpening on Real-World Data

Pansharpening is a crucial remote sensing technique that fuses low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) images with high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) imagery. Although deep learning techniques have significantly advanced pansharpening, many existing methods suffer from limited cross-sensor generalization and high computational overhead, restricting their real-time applications. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient framework that quickly adapts to a specific input instance, completing both training and inference in a short time. Our framework splits the input image into multiple patches, selects a subset for unsupervised CAT training, and then performs inference on all patches, stitching them into the final output. The CAT module, integrated between the feature extraction and channel transformation stages of a pre-trained network, tailors the fused features and fixes the parameters for efficient inference, generating improved results. Our approach offers two key advantages: (1) $\textit{Improved Generalization Ability}$: by mitigating cross-sensor degradation, our model--although pre-trained on a specific dataset--achieves superior performance on datasets captured by other sensors; (2) $\textit{Enhanced Computational Efficiency}$: the CAT-enhanced network can swiftly adapt to the test sample using the single LRMS-PAN pair input, without requiring extensive large-scale data retraining. Experiments on the real-world data from WorldView-3 and WorldView-2 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-sensor real-world data, while achieving both training and inference of $512\times512$ image within $\textit{0.4 seconds}$ and $4000\times4000$ image within $\textit{3 seconds}$ at the fastest setting on a commonly used RTX 3090 GPU.