Towards Autonomous Aircraft Surveillance from Nanosatellites through On-Board Inference and Generative Data Augmentation

Airborne surveillance from low Earth orbit is hindered by two interconnected bottlenecks: nanosatellites have a limited downlink budget, yet the conventional approach still transmits terabytes of raw imagery to the ground for processing, and open satellite datasets for aircraft are scarce and severely class-imbalanced. These limitations either delay timely decision-making or prevent standard de…