Alejandro D. Mousist

Alejandro D. Mousist

In small satellites there is less room for heat control equipment, scientific instruments, and electronic components. Furthermore, the near proximity of electronic components makes power dissipation difficult, with the risk of not being able to control the temperature appropriately, reducing component lifetime and mission performance. To address this challenge, taking advantage of the advent of increasing intelligence on board satellites, an autonomous thermal control tool that uses deep reinforcement learning is proposed for learning the thermal control policy onboard. The tool was evaluated in a real space edge processing computer that will be used in a demonstration payload hosted in the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment results show that the proposed framework is able to learn to control the payload processing power to maintain the temperature under operational ranges, complementing traditional thermal control systems.

Saad Mokssit, Ouassim Karrakchou, Alejandro Mousist et al.

Early-exit neural networks reduce inference cost by enabling confident predictions at intermediate layers. However, joint training often leads to gradient interference, with deeper classifiers dominating optimization. We propose Confidence-Gated Training (CGT), a paradigm that conditionally propagates gradients from deeper exits only when preceding exits fail. This encourages shallow classifiers to act as primary decision points while reserving deeper layers for harder inputs. By aligning training with the inference-time policy, CGT mitigates overthinking, improves early-exit accuracy, and preserves efficiency. Experiments on the Indian Pines and Fashion-MNIST benchmarks show that CGT lowers average inference cost while improving overall accuracy, offering a practical solution for deploying deep models in resource-constrained environments.

Alejandro D. Mousist

This work addresses mechanical defocus in Earth observation images from the IMAGIN-e mission aboard the ISS, proposing a blind deblurring approach adapted to space-based edge computing constraints. Leveraging Sentinel-2 data, our method estimates the defocus kernel and trains a restoration model within a GAN framework, effectively operating without reference images. On Sentinel-2 images with synthetic degradation, SSIM improved by 72.47% and PSNR by 25.00%, confirming the model's ability to recover lost details when the original clean image is known. On IMAGIN-e, where no reference images exist, perceptual quality metrics indicate a substantial enhancement, with NIQE improving by 60.66% and BRISQUE by 48.38%, validating real-world onboard restoration. The approach is currently deployed aboard the IMAGIN-e mission, demonstrating its practical application in an operational space environment. By efficiently handling high-resolution images under edge computing constraints, the method enables applications such as water body segmentation and contour detection while maintaining processing viability despite resource limitations.

Alejandro D. Mousist

Image-to-image (I2I) translation is an established way of translating data from one domain to another but the usability of the translated images in the target domain when working with such dissimilar domains as the SAR/optical satellite imagery ones and how much of the origin domain is translated to the target domain is still not clear enough. This article address this by performing translations of labelled datasets from the optical domain to the SAR domain with different I2I algorithms from the state-of-the-art, learning from transferred features in the destination domain and evaluating later how much from the original dataset was transferred. Added to this, stacking is proposed as a way of combining the knowledge learned from the different I2I translations and evaluated against single models.