Onboard classifiers for science event detection on a remote sensing spacecraft

• Main Authors: Rebecca Castano, Dominic Mazzoni, Nghia Tang, Ron Greeley, Thomas Doggett, Ben Cichy, Steve Chien, Ashley Davies
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Algorithms; Performance; Experimentation; Human Factors Keywords Classification; Support Vector Machine; Constrained processing environment; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.485.8257; http://ai.jpl.nasa.gov/public/papers/castano_kdd06_classifiers.pdf

Typically, data collected by a spacecraft is downlinked to Earth and pre-processed before any analysis is performed. We have developed classifiers that can be used onboard a spacecraft to identify high priority data for downlink to Earth, providing a method for maximizing the use of a potentially bandwidth limited downlink channel. Onboard analysis can also enable rapid reaction to dynamic events, such as flooding, volcanic eruptions or sea ice break-up. Four classifiers were developed to identify cryosphere events using hyperspectral images. These classifiers include a manually constructed classifier, a Support Vector Machine (SVM), a Decision Tree and a classifier derived by searching over combinations of thresholded band ratios. Each of the classifiers was designed to run in the computationally constrained operating environment of the spacecraft. A set of scenes was hand-labeled to provide training and testing data. Performance results on the test data indicate that the SVM and manual classifiers outperformed the Decision Tree and band-ratio classifiers with the SVM yielding slightly better classifications than the manual classifier. The manual and SVM classifiers have been uploaded to the EO-1 spacecraft and have been running onboard the spacecraft for over a year. Results of the onboard analysis are used by the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE) of NASA’s New Millennium Program onboard EO-1 to automatically target the spacecraft to collect follow-on imagery. The software demonstrates the potential for future deep space missions to use onboard decision making to capture short-lived science events.