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arXiv · 2605.06273

On-Orbit Real-Time Wildfire Detection Under On-Board Constraints

Matthias Rötzer·Veronika Pörtge·Martin Ickerott·Jayendra Praveen Kumar Chorapalli·Dimitri Scheftelowitsch·Max Bereczky·Dmitry Rashkovetsky·Sai Manoj Appalla·Julia Gottfriedsen
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Abstract

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.

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Matthias Rötzer, Veronika Pörtge, Martin Ickerott, Jayendra Praveen Kumar Chorapalli, Dimitri Scheftelowitsch, Max Bereczky, Dmitry Rashkovetsky, Sai Manoj Appalla, Julia Gottfriedsen. 2026-05-07. On-Orbit Real-Time Wildfire Detection Under On-Board Constraints. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06273

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