Toward Efficient Satellite Computing Through Adaptive Compression

Abstract

The rapid development of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations offers significant potential for in-orbit services, particularly in mitigating the impact of sudden natural disasters. However, the massive data collected by these satellites are often large and severely constrained by limited transmission capabilities when sending data to the ground. Satellite computing, which utilizes onboard computational capacity to process data before transmission, presents a promising solution to alleviate the downlink burden. Nonetheless, this paradigm introduces another bottleneck: limited onboard computing capacity, resulting in slow in-orbit processing and poor results. Current satellite computing systems struggle to efficiently address both data transmission and computing bottlenecks, particularly for urgent disaster services that demand accurate and timely results. Thus, we introduce an efficient satellite computing system designed to jointly mitigate these bottlenecks, thereby providing better service. The core idea is to utilize onboard computing capacity for swift in-orbit annotation of image regions, enabling adaptive compression and download based on annotation confidence and perceived downlink availability. Once the data is downloaded, image restoration and re-inference are performed on the ground to enhance accuracy. Compared to satellite-only inference, our system demonstrates an average improvement in inference accuracy of 3.8%. Furthermore, compared to ground-only inference, with only a 2.8% accuracy loss, our system achieves a 38.4% reduction in response time and saves 71.6% of downlink volume on average.