GABI: Geometry-Aware Boundary Integration for Spacecraft Segmentation
For autonomous spacecraft perception systems, GABI provides a lightweight solution that improves segmentation accuracy under harsh space illumination conditions, addressing the need for onboard processing with limited computational resources.
GABI introduces a lightweight boundary-aware multi-task segmentation architecture with an auxiliary distance-field prediction head for spacecraft segmentation, achieving up to 5% improvement in Average Precision on the SPARK benchmark and over 50% improvement in generalization experiments, while being up to ten times smaller than transformer models.
Accurate segmentation is crucial for autonomous spacecraft, as it directly affects downstream tasks related to 3D situational awareness. The harsh illumination conditions of space, however, produce images with high variability in appearance, hindering the generalization of segmentation approaches across different spacecraft and environments. In this work, we propose GABI, a lightweight boundary-aware multi-task segmentation architecture that augments a convolutional backbone with an auxiliary distance-field prediction head. The distance field provides dense geometric supervision around object boundaries, encouraging the network to learn spatially consistent representations of spacecraft structures while maintaining low model complexity suitable for onboard perception systems. We evaluated GABI against both an established convolutional baseline and a heavier transformer-based architecture. On the SPARK benchmark, distance-field supervision improves the baseline by up to $5\%$ in Average Precision while achieving performance comparable to the transformer models. In generalization experiments, GABI improves Average Precision by more than $50\%$ over the baseline. In cross-domain evaluation, the lightweight GABI variant performs within $5\%$ in IoU and F1-score of the heavier transformer model while being approximately ten times smaller. At the same time, the heavier GABI variant surpasses the transformer architectures while remaining nearly three times lighter.