A Satellite-Ground Synergistic Large Vision-Language Model System for Earth Observation

Abstract: Recently, large vision-LLMs (LVLMs) unleash powerful analysis capabilities for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite Earth observation images in the data center. However, fast satellite motion, brief satellite-ground station (GS) contact windows, and large size of the images pose a data download challenge. To enable near real-time Earth observation applications (e.g., disaster and extreme weather monitoring), we should explore how to deploy LVLM in LEO satellite networks, and design SpaceVerse, an efficient satellite-ground synergistic LVLM inference system. To this end, firstly, we deploy compact LVLMs on satellites for lightweight tasks, whereas regular LVLMs operate on GSs to handle computationally intensive tasks. Then, we propose a computing and communication co-design framework comprised of a progressive confidence network and an attention-based multi-scale preprocessing, used to identify on-satellite inferring data, and reduce data redundancy before satellite-GS transmission, separately. We implement and evaluate SpaceVerse on real-world LEO satellite constellations and datasets, achieving a 31.2% average gain in accuracy and a 51.2% reduction in latency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.