# Squeezing nnU-Nets with Knowledge Distillation for On-Board Cloud Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09886 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09886/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 4 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Cloud-Net: An end-to-end Cloud Detection Algorithm for Landsat 8 Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10077/) (2019)
- [Cloud Detection Algorithm for Remote Sensing Images Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05782/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Semantic Segmentation in Satellite Hyperspectral Imagery by Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16210/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for In-Orbit Cloud Segmentation and Classification in Hyperspectral Satellite Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08695/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cloud detection is a pivotal satellite image pre-processing step that can be performed both on the ground and on board a satellite to tag useful images. In the latter case, it can reduce the amount of data to downlink by pruning the cloudy areas, or to make a satellite more autonomous through data-driven acquisition re-scheduling. We approach this task with nnU-Nets, a self-reconfigurable framework able to perform meta-learning of a segmentation network over various datasets. Unfortunately, such models are commonly memory-inefficient due to their (very) large architectures. To benefit from them in on-board processing, we compress nnU-Nets with knowledge distillation into much smaller and compact U-Nets. Our experiments, performed over Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 images revealed that nnU-Nets deliver state-of-the-art performance without any manual design. Our approach was ranked within the top 7% best solutions (across 847 teams) in the On Cloud N: Cloud Cover Detection Challenge, where we reached the Jaccard index of 0.882 over more than 10k unseen Sentinel-2 images (the winners obtained 0.897, the baseline U-Net with the ResNet-34 backbone: 0.817, and the classic Sentinel-2 image thresholding: 0.652). Finally, we showed that knowledge distillation enables to elaborate dramatically smaller (almost 280x) U-Nets when compared to nnU-Nets while still maintaining their segmentation capabilities.