On-device inference on resource-constrained satellites combined with synthetic data generation can enable autonomous, real-time aircraft detection without overwhelming downlink capacity—shifting satellites from passive data collectors to active decision-makers.
This paper tackles satellite-based aircraft detection by running AI inference directly on small satellites (CubeSats) instead of sending raw images to Earth, and uses AI-generated synthetic images to train better detection models. The approach balances limited satellite bandwidth with scarce training data, enabling real-time autonomous surveillance from orbit.