A reconfigurable smart camera implementation for jet flames characterization based on an optimized segmentation model

Wildfire smoke detection from satellite imagery is critical for early warning and rapid response. For onboard satellite deployment, detection systems must operate under strict memory and latency constraints while providing spatially informative outputs for downstream decision-making. Existing tile-level classification methods are computationally efficient but lack spatial localization, whereas pixel-level segmentation approaches provide detailed masks yet are typically too computationally demanding for real-time onboard execution. To address this gap, we propose WISE (Weakly-supervised Inference-efficient Smoke Extraction), a deployment-oriented framework for onboard fire smoke detection and localization. WISE leverages only tile-level annotations through a teacher-student distillation strategy, where an offline teacher provides soft spatial supervision to a lightweight WISE-Student optimized for efficient onboard inference. The student jointly predicts tile-level smoke presence and smoke probability maps within a single forward pass, enabling spatially informative detection under strict computational constraints. WISE was evaluated through in-orbit execution aboard the ISS-mounted IMAGIN-e payload. Three model variants achieve average inference times of 0.10 s, 0.14 s, and 0.26 s per tile, indicating near-real-time per-tile inference within onboard resource limits. Ground-based experiments on Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 imagery further indicate effective detection and spatially informative localization. The best-performing variant achieves a mean tile-level F1 score of 0.964 and a mean pixel-level F1 score of 0.750 across 10 runs, while containing only 0.12M parameters and requiring approximately 3 GFLOPs. Together, these results indicate that WISE is a practical candidate for low-latency wildfire smoke monitoring from space under onboard resource constraints.

We present a deployed system for on-orbit wildfire detection aboard a nine-satellite commercial thermal infrared constellation, operating under demanding joint constraints: sub-megabyte model footprint, sub-150 ms per-batch TensorRT FP16 inference on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, and an end-to-end alert pipeline targeting under 10 minutes from satellite overpass to fire event communication. The system operates on uncalibrated mid-wave infrared (MWIR) single-band imagery at 200 m ground sampling distance, where fires frequently appear as sub-pixel or single-pixel thermal anomalies under extreme class imbalance -- challenges not addressed by the contextual thermal-thresholding pipelines (MODIS, VIIRS) that currently dominate operational fire monitoring. We present an empirical study of lightweight dense representation learning for this regime using a proprietary nine-satellite MWIR dataset. We compare dense masked autoencoding (DenseMAE) and a hybrid DenseMAE+EMA (exponential moving average) distillation variant, and evaluate representations via linear probing and full-distribution pixel-level average precision (AP) under extreme class imbalance. DenseMAE pretraining enables compact downstream models on the latency-accuracy Pareto frontier: our fastest SSL-pretrained model achieves 0.640 test AP and 0.69 event-level Fire-F1 with 65.34 ms latency per batch and a 0.52 MB engine, without pruning or compression. The best configuration reaches 0.699 AP and 0.744 Fire-F1 below 1 MB, outperforming a supervised baseline (0.650 AP) under comparable constraints.

Building upon our previous Ancilia framework, this work presents YUTELA, an edge--server--cloud AIoT system for long-term, multi-site video anomaly detection. YUTELA replaces workstation-based on-site processing with NVIDIA Jetson Thor edge devices and redesigns the multi-camera pipeline through camera batching and redistribution, shared memory, reduced inter-stage data transfer, task integration, and TensorRT-accelerated inference. It maintains a separate anomaly model per camera, retrained on a centralized GPU server once enough recent pseudo-normal data are collected, with updated weights returned to the edge. With eight cameras, TensorRT increases throughput from 14.17 to 29.94 FPS under normal density, and the optimized edge node exceeds the throughput of the workstation-based Ancilia system in seven of nine workload settings, reaching up to 2.03 times its throughput at extreme density. This gain comes at the cost of higher latency under lighter loads with four or eight streams. YUTELA was then operated continuously for 170 hours at four public sites using 31 existing CCTV cameras. The deployment shows that runtime load is driven by scene activity and input frame rate rather than by camera count, and that retraining frequency varies by about three times across sites. The 101 automatically triggered training events occupied only about 6.6% of a single GPU, indicating that one global node can support adaptation for tens of sites. Mean end-to-end alert latency ranged from 6.8 to 15.4~s depending on site traffic and anomaly type. These results show that YUTELA enables practical multi-camera edge processing with low-cost, camera-specific adaptation across heterogeneous sites.