STA-GAN: A Spatio-Temporal Attention Generative Adversarial Network for Missing Value Imputation in Satellite Data

Satellite data is of high importance for ocean environment monitoring and protection. However, due to the missing values in satellite data, caused by various force majeure factors such as cloud cover, bad weather and sensor failure, the quality of satellite data is reduced greatly, which hinders the applications of satellite data in practice. Therefore, a variety of methods have been proposed to conduct missing data imputation for satellite data to improve its quality. However, these methods cannot well learn the short-term temporal dependence and dynamic spatial dependence in satellite data, resulting in bad imputation performance when the data missing rate is large. To address this issue, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Attention Generative Adversarial Network (STA-GAN) for missing value imputation in satellite data. First, we develop the Spatio-Temporal Attention (STA) mechanism based on Graph Attention Network (GAT) to learn features for capturing both short-term temporal dependence and dynamic spatial dependence in satellite data. Then, the learned features from STA are fused to enrich the spatio-temporal information for training the generator and discriminator of STA-GAN. Finally, we use the generated imputation data by the trained generator of STA-GAN to fill the missing values in satellite data. Experimental results on real datasets show that STA-GAN largely outperforms the baseline data imputation methods, especially for filling satellite data with large missing rates.