Clear-Weighted Bit Allocation for Satellite Downlinks
Earth-observation satellites capture more imagery than intermittent ground contacts can transmit. Onboard systems threshold a cloud detector, discard frames or tiles, and compress the survivors with a fixed codec. On expert-labeled imagery, these rules remove more than one-fifth of clear pixels, primarily through detector false positives. We train a neural codec with a clear-probability-weighted reconstruction loss, reallocating coded bytes from clouds to clear ground without requiring or transmitting a cloud map onboard. Each capture is encoded into a resumable base layer and a dependent refinement layer, while clear content is estimated from features produced by the encoder. At each con...
| Authors | Alireza Furutanpey, Qiyang Zhang, Yujie Huang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.NI |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
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