HyperspectralViTs: Fast and Accurate methane detection on-board satellites

Abstract: On-board processing of hyperspectral data with machine learning models would enable unprecedented amount of autonomy for a wide range of tasks, for example methane detection or mineral identification. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributor to climate change, and it's automated detection on-board of satellites using machine learning models would allow for early warning system and could enable new capabilities such as automated scheduling inside constellations of satellites. Classical methods for methane detection suffer from high false positive rates and previous deep learning models exhibit prohibitive computational requirements. We propose fast and accurate machine learning architectures which support end-to-end training with data of high spectral dimension. We evaluate our models on two tasks related to hyperspectral data processing - methane leak detection and mineral identification. With our proposed general architectures, we improve the F1 score of the previous methane detection state-of-the-art models by more than 27% on a newly created synthetic dataset and by almost 13% on the previously released large benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate that training models on the synthetic dataset improves performance of models finetuned on the dataset of real events by 6.9% in F1 score in contrast with training from scratch. On a newly created dataset for mineral identification, our models provide 3.5% improvement in the F1 score in contrast to the default versions of the models. With our proposed models we improve the inference speed by 85.19% in contrast to previous classical and deep learning approaches by removing the dependency on classically computed features. Namely, one capture from the EMIT sensor can be processed in only 30 seconds on a realistic proxy hardware used on the ION-SCV 004 satellite.