Benchmarking Deep Learning Inference of Remote Sensing Imagery on the Qualcomm Snapdragon and Intel Movidius Myriad X Processors Onboard the International Space Station

As space missions become more distant, the need for onboard analysis and image recognition becomes even more important. Deep learning is state of the art in computer vision [1], so our goal is to demonstrate onboard inference with these algorithms. Traditional flight hardware provides modest compute especially compared to laptop and desktop computers. A new generation of commercial off the shelf (COTS) processors, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon and Movidius Myriad X, deliver significant compute in small Size Weight and Power (SWaP) and offer direct hardware acceleration for neural networks. We deploy deep learning models on these processors onboard the International Space Station (ISS). We benchmark a variety of algorithms trained on imagery from Earth or Mars, as well as some standard deep learning models for image classification.