Situational awareness during a catastrophic natural disaster, such as a flood, wildfire, tsunami or earthquake is often described by disaster responders as an information ‘fog’ as once trusted systems break down and confusion and panic rise during rapidly changing circumstances. Indeed in many catastrophic events, severe loss of life happens in the days after the event itself. Satellites have already played a key role in disasters, however the advent of on-board intelligence, paired with terrestrial digital twins on the ground opens up a phase-change in the efficacy of space data to support both disaster resilience and response - which we have been calling ‘live twinning’. Over the past three years, Trillium with support from Frontier Development Lab and commercial partners has been running numerous experiments in onboard machine learning with flight-proven examples of machine learning (software) payloads showing the potential of novel observation approaches - particularly in the realm of providing greater insight during catastrophic events. In parallel, we have been experimenting with surrogate models of complex terrestrial phenomena. Live-twinning applies onboard ML and Earth system models to improve insights for rapid responses during natural catastrophes.

In Earth observation, deep learning models rely heavily on comprehensive datasets for training and evaluation. However, the relevance of data quality is often underestimated, leading to subpar generalization in real-world remote sensing scenarios. This study aims to bridge this gap by proposing a straightforward method to identify critical human annotation errors in semantic segmentation datasets. The approach is based on two indices: trustworthiness and hardness. By implementing these indices, we estimate the extent of human annotation errors in CloudSEN12, a global dataset specifically designed for cloud detection in Sentinel-2 imagery. Considering only the trustworthiness index, our approach identified 1794 potential labelling errors among 10,000 image patches. Out of these, 106 were confirmed as human errors, resulting in a true positive rate of 9.86%. When this method was applied to other extensive cloud masking datasets, such as KappaSet and Sentinel-2 Cloud Mask Catalogue, it was found that over 44% of the human labels were inaccurate. These results do not imply the inferior quality of these datasets, instead, they highlight the considerable shift between the annotation protocols, making inter-dataset benchmarking exercises inequitable.

This paper introduces DTACSNet, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model specifically developed for efficient onboard atmospheric correction and cloud detection in optical Earth observation satellites. The model is developed with Sentinel-2 data. Through a comparative analysis with the operational Sen2Cor processor, DTACSNet demonstrates a significantly better performance in cloud scene classification (F2 score of 0.89 for DTACSNet compared to 0.51 for Sen2Cor v2.8) and a surface reflectance estimation with average absolute error below 2% in reflectance units. Moreover, we tested DTACSNet on hardware-constrained systems similar to recent deployed missions and show that DTACSNet is 11 times faster than Sen2Cor with a significantly lower memory consumption footprint. These preliminary results highlight the potential of DTACSNet to provide enhanced efficiency, autonomy, and responsiveness in onboard data processing for Earth observation satellite missions.

Artificial intelligence onboard satellites has the potential to reduce data transmission requirements, enable real-time decision-making and collaboration within constellations. This study deploys a lightweight foundational model called RaVAEn on D-Orbit’s ION SCV004 satellite. RaVAEn is a variational auto-encoder (VAE) that generates compressed latent vectors from small image tiles, enabling several downstream tasks. In this work we demonstrate the reliable use of RaVAEn onboard a satellite, achieving an encoding time of 0.110s for tiles of a 4.8x4.8 km2area. In addition, we showcase fast few-shot training onboard a satellite using the latent representation of data. We compare the deployment of the model on the on-board CPU and on the available Myriad vision processing unit (VPU) accelerator. To our knowledge, this work shows for the first time the deployment of a multitask model onboard a CubeSat and the onboard training of a machine learning model.

In this work, we propose to exploit both the temporal and spatial correlations in Earth observation satellite images through deep learning methods. In particular, the combination of a U-Net convolutional neural network together with a convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) layer is proposed. This model is applied for cloud detection on MSG/SEVIRI image time series over selected landmarks. Implementation details are provided and our proposal is compared against a standard SVM and a U-Net without the convolutional LSTM layer but including temporal information too. Experimental results show that this combination of networks exploits both the spatial and temporal dependence and provides state-of-the-art classification results on this dataset.

Training machine learning algorithms for new satellites requires collecting new data. This is a critical drawback for most remote sensing applications and specially for cloud detection. A sensible strategy to mitigate this problem is to exploit available data from a similar sensor, which involves transforming this data to resemble the new sensor data. However, even taking into account the technical characteristics of both sensors to transform the images, statistical differences between data distributions still remain. This results in a poor performance of the methods trained on one sensor and applied to the new one. In this this work, we propose to use the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework to adapt the data from the new satellite. In particular, we use Landsat-8 images, with the corresponding ground truth, to perform cloud detection in Proba-V. Results show that the GANs adaptation significantly improves the detection accuracy.

Cloud detection is a key issue for exploiting the information from Earth observation satellites multispectral sensors. For Proba-V, cloud detection is challenging due to the limited number of spectral bands. Advanced machine learning methods, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), have shown to work well on this problem provided enough labeled data. However, simultaneous collocated information about the presence of clouds is usually not available or requires a great amount of manual labor. In this work, we propose to learn from the available Landsat -8 cloud masks datasets and transfer this learning to solve the Proba-V cloud detection problem. CNN are trained with Landsat images adapted to resemble Proba-V characteristics and tested on a large set of real Proba-V scenes. Developed models outperform current operational Proba-V cloud detection without being trained with any real Proba-V data. Moreover, cloud detection accuracy can be further increased if the CNN are fine-tuned using a limited amount of Proba-V data.

Kernel methods have been very successful in remote sensing problems because of their ability to deal with high dimensional non-linear data. However, they are computationally expensive to train when a large amount of samples are used. In this context, while the amount of available remote sensing data has constantly increased, the size of training sets in kernel methods is usually restricted to few thousand samples. In this work, we modified the kernel ridge regression (KRR) training procedure to deal with large scale datasets. In addition, the basis functions in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space are defined as parameters to be also optimized during the training process. This extends the number of free parameters from two (in the standard KRR with an RBF kernel) to more than fifty thousand in our experiments. The effectiveness of the proposal is illustrated in the problem of surface temperature estimation from MetOp-IASI hyperspectral infrared sounding data. The data set used contains more than one million samples, but the proposed method could potentially be trained with much more data.

Water quality parameters are derived applying several machine learning regression methods on the Case2eXtreme dataset (C2X). The used data are based on Hydrolight in-water radiative transfer simulations at Sentinel-3 OLCI wavebands, and the application is done exclusively for absorbing waters with high concentrations of coloured dissolved organic matter (CDOM). The regression approaches are: regularized linear, random forest, Kernel ridge, Gaussian process and support vector regressors. The validation is made with and an independent simulation dataset. A comparison with the OLCI Neural Network Swarm (ONSS) is made as well. The best approached is applied to a sample scene and compared with the standard OLCI product delivered by EUMETSAT/ESA.

This paper presents the development and implementation of a cloud detection algorithm for Proba-V. Accurate and automatic detection of clouds in satellite scenes is a key issue for a wide range of remote sensing applications. With no accurate cloud masking, undetected clouds are one of the most significant sources of error in both sea and land cover biophysical parameter retrieval. The objective of the algorithms presented in this paper is to detect clouds accurately providing a cloud flag per pixel. For this purpose, the method exploits the information of Proba-V using statistical machine learning techniques to identify the clouds present in Proba-V products. The effectiveness of the proposed method is successfully illustrated using a large number of real Proba-V images.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have proven to be state of the art methods for many image classification tasks and their use is rapidly increasing in remote sensing problems. One of their major strengths is that, when enough data is available, CNN perform an end-to-end learning without the need of custom feature extraction methods. In this work, we study the use of different CNN architectures for cloud masking of Proba-V multispectral images. We compare such methods with the more classical machine learning approach based on feature extraction plus supervised classification. Experimental results suggest that CNN are a promising alternative for solving cloud masking problems.

The vast amount of data acquired by current high resolution Earth observation satellites implies some technical challenges to be faced. Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform provides a framework for the development of algorithms and products built over this data in an easy and scalable manner. In this paper, we take advantage of the GEE platform capabilities to exploit the wealth of information in the temporal dimension by processing a long time series of satellite images. A cloud detection algorithm for Landsat-8, which uses previous images of the same location to detect clouds, is implemented and tested on the GEE platform.