Onboard classifiers for science event detection on a remote sensing spacecraft

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 man...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Ashley Davies, Benjamin Cichy, Dominic Mazzoni, Nghia Tang, Rebecca Castaño, Ronald Greeley, Steve A. Chien, Thomas Doggett
• Keywords: Data Mining, KDD 2006, Manual Classifiers, Program Onboard Eo-1, Svm Classifiers