TCM-CR: Multi-Temporal SAR–Optical Cloud Removal with a Reference Image and Gated Bounded Residual

Cloud removal is an indispensable preprocessing step in optical remote sensing. Reconstructing cloud-free imagery by combining multi-temporal optical observations with cloud-penetrating synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has become a mainstream approach. However, the existing studies mostly adopt simple composites, such as per-pixel least-cloudy selection or the temporal median, as baselines, and average accuracy metrics over entire scenes; together, these two practices may overstate the true gains of deep-learning methods. This paper proposes a temporal cross-modal cloud removal method (TCM-CR). In a multi-temporal sequence, the acquisition with the lowest cloud fraction retains true surface reflectance at its cloud-free pixels and is itself a high-accuracy baseline. TCM-CR exploits this baseline in two ways. First, on clear and light inputs, cloud-free pixels are taken unchanged from the reference image, so the true reflectance is preserved without loss, independent of training. Second, only cloud-covered pixels receive a bounded correction, in which SAR supplies the surface structure beneath clouds and multi-temporal observations are integrated along time while suppressing heavily clouded acquisitions. Experiments on the SEN12MS-CR-TS dataset show that TCM-CR maintains accuracy on par with the reference image on clear and light samples and improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio on heavy samples by 7.93 dB. In a cross-region experiment where one region is excluded from training entirely and used only for testing, heavy samples still improve by 7.27 dB.