Rethinking Satellite Image Restoration for Onboard AI: A Lightweight Learning-Based Approach

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Hauptverfasser: Dorise, Adrien, Bellizzi, Marjorie, Hlimi, Omar
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Dorise, Adrien
Bellizzi, Marjorie
Hlimi, Omar
author_facet Dorise, Adrien
Bellizzi, Marjorie
Hlimi, Omar
contents Satellite image restoration aims to improve image quality by compensating for degradations (e.g., noise and blur) introduced by the imaging system and acquisition conditions. As a fundamental preprocessing step, restoration directly impacts both ground-based product generation and emerging onboard AI applications. Traditional restoration pipelines based on sequential physical models are computationally intensive and slow, making them unsuitable for onboard environments. In this paper, we introduce ConvBEERS: a Convolutional Board-ready Embedded and Efficient Restoration model for Space to investigate whether a light and non-generative residual convolutional network, trained on simulated satellite data, can match or surpass a traditional ground-processing restoration pipeline across multiple operating conditions. Experiments conducted on simulated datasets and real Pleiades-HR imagery demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive image quality, with a +6.9dB PSNR improvement. Evaluation on a downstream object detection task demonstrates that restoration significantly improves performance, with up to +5.1% mAP@50. In addition, successful deployment on a Xilinx Versal VCK190 FPGA validates its practical feasibility for satellite onboard processing, with a ~41x reduction in latency compared to the traditional pipeline. These results demonstrate the relevance of using lightweight CNNs to achieve competitive restoration quality while addressing real-world constraints in spaceborne systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12807
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Satellite Image Restoration for Onboard AI: A Lightweight Learning-Based Approach
Dorise, Adrien
Bellizzi, Marjorie
Hlimi, Omar
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Satellite image restoration aims to improve image quality by compensating for degradations (e.g., noise and blur) introduced by the imaging system and acquisition conditions. As a fundamental preprocessing step, restoration directly impacts both ground-based product generation and emerging onboard AI applications. Traditional restoration pipelines based on sequential physical models are computationally intensive and slow, making them unsuitable for onboard environments. In this paper, we introduce ConvBEERS: a Convolutional Board-ready Embedded and Efficient Restoration model for Space to investigate whether a light and non-generative residual convolutional network, trained on simulated satellite data, can match or surpass a traditional ground-processing restoration pipeline across multiple operating conditions. Experiments conducted on simulated datasets and real Pleiades-HR imagery demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive image quality, with a +6.9dB PSNR improvement. Evaluation on a downstream object detection task demonstrates that restoration significantly improves performance, with up to +5.1% mAP@50. In addition, successful deployment on a Xilinx Versal VCK190 FPGA validates its practical feasibility for satellite onboard processing, with a ~41x reduction in latency compared to the traditional pipeline. These results demonstrate the relevance of using lightweight CNNs to achieve competitive restoration quality while addressing real-world constraints in spaceborne systems.
title Rethinking Satellite Image Restoration for Onboard AI: A Lightweight Learning-Based Approach
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12807