arXiv AI
Oct 9

AI-Based On-Board Maritime Object Detection for Earth Observation Payload Data Reduction on Versal Embedded Hardware

The paper presents an AI-based system for onboard maritime object detection on Earth‑observation satellites, aiming to reduce data volume by selectively downlinking relevant vessel information. A YOLOX‑S detector is trained on a dataset of 68 Maxar scenes with 43 vessel classes, then quantized and deployed on a Versal VC1902 DPU with minimal loss in accuracy and a few‑second processing time per scene. Various downlink modes—metadata only, image crops, tiles, or full scenes—are evaluated, showing that tiles retain 98% of vessels while reducing scene volume to 29%, and crops retain 83% with only 3% of the volume.

By Thomas Goudemant, Aur\'elien Bobey, Omar Hlimi, Marjorie Bellizzi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

CoralscapesV2: Panoptic and Fine-Grained Visual Scene Understanding in Coral Reefs

CoralscapesV2 is an expanded dataset for coral reef visual scene understanding, increasing the number of fine‑grained classes from 39 to 95 and adding 65,000 exhaustive fish instance masks. It supports panoptic segmentation by providing high‑quality semantic and instance labels across diverse, unconstrained reef imagery. The dataset serves as a challenging benchmark for modern segmentation models and enables broader applications such as benthic cover mapping and automated fish‑reef interaction analysis.

By Jonathan Sauder, Thomas Ruckli, Gabriel\.e Strodomskyt\.e, Ibrahim Souleiman Abdallah, Rahma Hassan Abdi, Djama Goumaneh Awaleh, Mohamed Houssein Farah, Moustapha Nour, Osama Sharhubil Saad, Mustafa Mohammed Khalafallah Altaib, Maysoon Kteifan, Farah Alsoqi, Eyad Zgool, Jafar Al-Omari, Temesgen Gebremeskel Gebreluel, Zekaria Zekeria Abdulkerim, Meron Ghirmay, Teklehaimanot Beraki, Devis Tuia, Guilhem Banc-Prandi