A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Computers

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Main Authors: Sam, Jeffrey Joan, Sathe, Janhavi, Chigali, Nikhil, Gupta, Naman, Ruparel, Radhey, Jiang, Yicheng, Singh, Janmajay, Berck, James W., Barman, Arko
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sam, Jeffrey Joan
Sathe, Janhavi
Chigali, Nikhil
Gupta, Naman
Ruparel, Radhey
Jiang, Yicheng
Singh, Janmajay
Berck, James W.
Barman, Arko
author_facet Sam, Jeffrey Joan
Sathe, Janhavi
Chigali, Nikhil
Gupta, Naman
Ruparel, Radhey
Jiang, Yicheng
Singh, Janmajay
Berck, James W.
Barman, Arko
contents Spacecraft deployed in outer space are routinely subjected to various forms of damage due to exposure to hazardous environments. In addition, there are significant risks to the subsequent process of in-space repairs through human extravehicular activity or robotic manipulation, incurring substantial operational costs. Recent developments in image segmentation could enable the development of reliable and cost-effective autonomous inspection systems. While these models often require large amounts of training data to achieve satisfactory results, publicly available annotated spacecraft segmentation data are very scarce. Here, we present a new dataset of nearly 64k annotated spacecraft images that was created using real spacecraft models, superimposed on a mixture of real and synthetic backgrounds generated using NASA's TTALOS pipeline. To mimic camera distortions and noise in real-world image acquisition, we also added different types of noise and distortion to the images. Our dataset includes images with several real-world challenges, including noise, camera distortions, glare, varying lighting conditions, varying field of view, partial spacecraft visibility, brightly-lit city backgrounds, densely patterned and confounding backgrounds, aurora borealis, and a wide variety of spacecraft geometries. Finally, we finetuned YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 models for spacecraft segmentation to generate performance benchmarks for the dataset under well-defined hardware and inference time constraints to mimic real-world image segmentation challenges for real-time onboard applications in space on NASA's inspector spacecraft. The resulting models, when tested under these constraints, achieved a Dice score of 0.92, Hausdorff distance of 0.69, and an inference time of about 0.5 second. The dataset and models for performance benchmark are available at https://github.com/RiceD2KLab/SWiM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10775
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Computers
Sam, Jeffrey Joan
Sathe, Janhavi
Chigali, Nikhil
Gupta, Naman
Ruparel, Radhey
Jiang, Yicheng
Singh, Janmajay
Berck, James W.
Barman, Arko
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Image and Video Processing
Spacecraft deployed in outer space are routinely subjected to various forms of damage due to exposure to hazardous environments. In addition, there are significant risks to the subsequent process of in-space repairs through human extravehicular activity or robotic manipulation, incurring substantial operational costs. Recent developments in image segmentation could enable the development of reliable and cost-effective autonomous inspection systems. While these models often require large amounts of training data to achieve satisfactory results, publicly available annotated spacecraft segmentation data are very scarce. Here, we present a new dataset of nearly 64k annotated spacecraft images that was created using real spacecraft models, superimposed on a mixture of real and synthetic backgrounds generated using NASA's TTALOS pipeline. To mimic camera distortions and noise in real-world image acquisition, we also added different types of noise and distortion to the images. Our dataset includes images with several real-world challenges, including noise, camera distortions, glare, varying lighting conditions, varying field of view, partial spacecraft visibility, brightly-lit city backgrounds, densely patterned and confounding backgrounds, aurora borealis, and a wide variety of spacecraft geometries. Finally, we finetuned YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 models for spacecraft segmentation to generate performance benchmarks for the dataset under well-defined hardware and inference time constraints to mimic real-world image segmentation challenges for real-time onboard applications in space on NASA's inspector spacecraft. The resulting models, when tested under these constraints, achieved a Dice score of 0.92, Hausdorff distance of 0.69, and an inference time of about 0.5 second. The dataset and models for performance benchmark are available at https://github.com/RiceD2KLab/SWiM.
title A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Computers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10775