Efficient adaptation of deep neural networks for semantic segmentation in space applications

In recent years, the application of Deep Learning techniques has shown remarkable success in various computer vision tasks, paving the way for their deployment in extraterrestrial exploration. Transfer learning has emerged as a powerful strategy for addressing the scarcity of labeled data in these novel environments. This paper represents one of the first efforts in evaluating the feasibility of employing adapters toward efficient transfer learning for rock segmentation in extraterrestrial landscapes, mainly focusing on lunar and martian terrains. Our work suggests that the use of adapters, strategically integrated into a pre-trained backbone model, can be successful in reducing both bandwidth and memory requirements for the target extraterrestrial device. In this study, we considered two memory-saving strategies: layer fusion (to reduce to zero the inference overhead) and an “adapter ranking” (to also reduce the transmission cost). Finally, we evaluate these results in terms of task performance, memory, and computation on embedded devices, evidencing trade-offs that open the road to more research in the field. The code will be open-sourced upon acceptance of the article.