Unlocking the Use of Raw Multispectral Earth Observation Imagery for Onboard Artificial Intelligence (2305.11891v2)

Abstract: Nowadays, there is growing interest in applying AI on board Earth Observation (EO) satellites for time-critical applications, such as natural disaster response. However, the unavailability of raw satellite data currently hinders research on lightweight pre-processing techniques and limits the exploration of end-to-end pipelines, which could offer more efficient and accurate extraction of insights directly from the source data. To fill this gap, this work presents a novel methodology to automate the creation of datasets for the detection of target events (e.g., warm thermal hotspots) or objects (e.g., vessels) from Sentinel-2 raw data and other multispectral EO pushbroom raw imagery. The presented approach first processes the raw data by applying a pipeline consisting of spatial band registration and georeferencing of the raw data pixels. Then, it detects the target events by leveraging event-specific state-of-the-art algorithms on the Level-1C products, which are mosaicked and cropped on the georeferenced correspondent raw granule area. The detected events are finally re-projected back onto the corresponding raw images. We apply the proposed methodology to realize THRawS (Thermal Hotspots in Raw Sentinel-2 data), the first dataset of Sentinel-2 raw data containing warm thermal hotspots. THRawS includes 1090 samples containing wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and 33,335 event-free acquisitions to enable thermal hotspot detection and general classification applications. This dataset and associated toolkits provide the community with both an immediately useful resource as well as a framework and methodology acting as a template for future additions. With this work, we hope to pave the way for research on energy-efficient pre-processing algorithms and AI-based end-to-end processing systems on board EO satellites.