Semantic Segmentation of Low Earth Orbit Satellites using Convolutional Neural Networks

Julia Yang, Jacob Lucas, Trent Kyono, Michael Abercrombie, Andrew Vanden Berg, Justin Fletcher

Abstract: Ground-based imaging of objects in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is complicated by atmospheric turbulence, which make it difficult to identify key features or components on the object of interest. Many automated image reconstruction techniques are in use, but expert labor is needed to subjectively discern and identify truth features on a partially reconstructed image. In this paper, we present a deep learning approach for semantic segmentation of ground-based images of LEO objects. We investigate the performance under various atmospheric turbulence strengths in terms of the Fried parameter (r0) and show the viability of this method.