Inference in Supervised Spectral Classifiers for On-Board Hyperspectral Imaging: An Overview

Machine learning techniques are widely used for pixel-wise classification of hyperspectral images. These methods can achieve high accuracy, but most of them are computationally intensive models. This poses a problem for their implementation in low-power and embedded systems intended for on-board processing, in which energy consumption and model size are as important as accuracy. With a focus on embedded and on-board systems (in which only the inference step is performed after an off-line training process), in this paper we provide a comprehensive overview of the inference properties of the most relevant techniques for hyperspectral image classification. For this purpose, we compare the size of the trained models and the operations required during the inference step (which are directly related to the hardware and energy requirements). Our goal is to search for appropriate trade-offs between on-board implementation (such as model size and energy consumption) and classification accuracy.