Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection in Spacecraft Telemetry on Edge Devices
Organizations: IU International University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Abstract
Spacecraft anomaly detection is critical for mission safety, yet deploying sophisticated models on-board presents significant challenges due to hardware constraints. This paper investigates three approaches for spacecraft telemetry anomaly detection -- forecasting & threshold, direct classification, and image classification -- and optimizes them for edge deployment using multi-objective neural architecture optimization on the European Space Agency Anomaly Dataset. Our baseline experiments demonstrate that forecasting & threshold achieves superior detection performance (92.7% Corrected Event-wise F0.5-score (CEF0.5)) [1] compared to alternatives. Through Pareto-optimal architecture optimization, we dramatically reduced computational requirements while maintaining capabilities -- the optimized forecasting & threshold model preserved 88.8% CEF0.5 while reducing RAM usage by 97.1% to just 59 KB and operations by 99.4%. Analysis of deployment viability shows our optimized models require just 0.36-6.25% of CubeSat RAM, making on-board anomaly detection practical even on highly constrained hardware. This research demonstrates that sophisticated anomaly detection capabilities can be successfully deployed within spacecraft edge computing constraints, providing near-instantaneous detection without exceeding hardware limitations or compromising mission safety.
Figures & tables
| Baseline | Optimized | |||||
| Metric | Direct classification | Image classification | Forecasting & threshold | Direct classification | Image classification | Forecasting & threshold |
| Event-wise Precision (%) | 95.3 | 50.2 | 99.8 | 91.1 | 99.1 | 99.9 |
| Event-wise Recall (%) | 36.9 | 43.1 | 72.3 | 16.9 | 32.3 | 61.6 |
| Event-wise F 0.5 (%) | 72.4 | 48.6 | 92.7 | 48.5 | 70.1 | 88.8 |
| Parameters | 310k | 1,254k | 317k | 19k | 128k | 29k |
| MACs | 56,538k | 959,367k | 56,735k | 907k | 45,000k | 354k |
| Baseline | Optimized | |||||
| Metric | Direct classification | Image classification | Forecasting & threshold | Direct classification | Image classification | Forecasting & threshold |
| Event-wise F 0.5 (%) | 72.4 | 48.6 | 92.7 | 48.5 | 70.1 | 88.8 |
| RAM (KB) | 1,606 | 8,193 | 2,043 | 122 | 1,024 | 59 |
| ROM (KB) | 1,268 | 4,902 | 1,294 | 149 | 508 | 166 |
| RAM (%) CubeSat (16 MB) | 9.80 | 50.01 | 12.47 | 0.74 | 6.25 | 0.36 |
| ROM (%) CubeSat (64 MB) | 1.93 | 7.48 | 1.97 | 0.23 | 0.78 | 0.25 |
Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection finds rare or unexpected patterns in data, from defective products and system faults to fraud and security threats.
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