SatReg: Regression-based Neural Architecture Search for Lightweight Satellite Image Segmentation

📅 2026-04-11
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of deploying lightweight remote sensing image segmentation models under stringent latency and energy constraints in on-orbit and edge computing scenarios. We propose a hardware-aware neural architecture search method that compresses the high-dimensional search space into two critical width variables. Leveraging CM-UNet as a teacher model, our approach integrates knowledge distillation with a low-fidelity regression surrogate model sampled on the Jetson Orin Nano to jointly predict segmentation accuracy and hardware costs, enabling rapid architecture selection. The method substantially improves search efficiency, achieving competitive mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) while significantly reducing latency and power consumption. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the reduced-space regression strategy tailored for CNN-Mamba hybrid architectures in satellite-edge deployment settings.

Technology Category

Machine Learning: Hardware-aware MLComputer Vision: SegmentationSearch and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search enginesSystems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applicationsSemantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
📝 Abstract
As Earth-observation workloads move toward onboard and edge processing, remote-sensing segmentation models must operate under tight latency and energy constraints. We present SatReg, a regression-based hardware-aware tuning framework for lightweight remote-sensing segmentation on edge platforms. Using CM-UNet as the teacher architecture, we reduce the search space to two dominant width-related variables, profile a small set of student models on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, and fit low-order surrogate models for mIoU, latency, and power. Knowledge distillation is used to efficiently train the sampled students. The learned surrogates enable fast selection of near-optimal architecture settings for deployment targets without exhaustive search. Results show that the selected variables affect task accuracy and hardware cost differently, making reduced-space regression a practical strategy for adapting hybrid CNN-Mamba segmentation models to future space-edge systems.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

satellite image segmentation
neural architecture search
edge computing
hardware-aware
lightweight models
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

neural architecture search
hardware-aware optimization
knowledge distillation
surrogate modeling
edge computing
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