  Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is prevalent in the remote sensing field but
is difficult to interpret in human visual perception. Recently, SAR-to-optical
(S2O) image conversion methods have provided a prospective solution for
interpretation. However, since there is a huge domain difference between
optical and SAR images, they suffer from low image quality and geometric
distortion in the produced optical images. Motivated by the analogy between
pixels during the S2O image translation and molecules in a heat field,
Thermodynamics-inspired Network for SAR-to-Optical Image Translation (S2O-TDN)
is proposed in this paper. Specifically, we design a Third-order Finite
Difference (TFD) residual structure in light of the TFD equation of
thermodynamics, which allows us to efficiently extract inter-domain invariant
features and facilitate the learning of the nonlinear translation mapping. In
addition, we exploit the first law of thermodynamics (FLT) to devise an
FLT-guided branch that promotes the state transition of the feature values from
the unstable diffusion state to the stable one, aiming to regularize the
feature diffusion and preserve image structures during S2O image translation.
S2O-TDN follows an explicit design principle derived from thermodynamic theory
and enjoys the advantage of explainability. Experiments on the public SEN1-2
dataset show the advantages of the proposed S2O-TDN over the current methods
with more delicate textures and higher quantitative results.
