Scalable neural pushbroom architectures for real-time denoising of hyperspectral images onboard satellites

The next generation of Earth observation satellites will seek to deploy intelligent models directly onboard the payload in order to minimize the latency incurred by the transmission and processing chain of the ground segment, for time-critical applications. Designing neural architectures for onboard execution, particularly for satellite-based hyperspectral imagers, poses novel challenges due to the unique constraints of this environment and imaging system that are largely unexplored by the traditional computer vision literature. In this paper, we show that this setting requires addressing three competing objectives, namely high-quality inference with low complexity, dynamic power scalability and fault tolerance. We focus on the problem of hyperspectral image denoising, which is a critical task to enable effective downstream inference, and highlights the constraints of the onboard processing scenario. We propose a neural network design that addresses the three aforementioned objectives with several novel contributions. In particular, we propose a mixture of denoisers that can be resilient to radiation-induced faults as well as allowing for time-varying power scaling. Moreover, each denoiser employs an innovative architecture where an image is processed line-by-line in a causal way, with a memory of past lines, in order to match the acquisition process of pushbroom hyperspectral sensors and greatly limit memory requirements. We show that the proposed architecture can run in real-time, i.e., process one line in the time it takes to acquire the next one, on low-power hardware and provide competitive denoising quality with respect to significantly more complex state-of-the-art models. We also show that the power scalability and fault tolerance objectives provide a design space with multiple tradeoffs between those properties and denoising quality.