Application of a U-Net Segmentation Model in Land Cover Classification for Use in Automated Data Prefiltering Onboard Nanosatellites

The limited physical constraints of nanosatellites due to their size, hinders their ability to transmit large amounts of image data. Because of this, the use of machine learning methods to filter data onboard has become more prominent to increase the bandwidth efficiency of these devices. By having an AI-based classification system for the images, the bandwidth necessary to transmit all these images and the tradeoff when it comes to storage, can potentially be offloaded through having a system which generates metadata that can indicate the data samples which offer the most usability, thus freeing up more space and bandwidth for these more important samples. This study explores the task of land cover classification, by utilizing one of the more prominent image segmentation models, U-Net. The model is implemented and evaluated using Pytorch using the DeepGlobe 2018 land cover classification dataset, achieving an average class IoU score of 0.68. This study seeks to support the viability of such a solution and is intended to support any future work which seeks to implement a fully automated data prefiltering system for satellite imagery.