Brain-Inspired Online Adaptation for Remote Sensing with Spiking Neural Network

On-device computing, or edge computing, is becoming increasingly important for remote sensing, particularly in applications like deep network-based perception on on-orbit satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In these scenarios, two brain-like capabilities are crucial for remote sensing models: (1) high energy efficiency, allowing the model to operate on edge devices with limited computing resources, and (2) online adaptation, enabling the model to quickly adapt to environmental variations, weather changes, and sensor drift. This work addresses these needs by proposing an online adaptation framework based on spiking neural networks (SNNs) for remote sensing. Starting with a pretrained SNN model, we design an efficient, unsupervised online adaptation algorithm, which adopts an approximation of the BPTT algorithm and only involves forward-in-time computation that significantly reduces the computational complexity of SNN adaptation learning. Besides, we propose an adaptive activation scaling scheme to boost online SNN adaptation performance, particularly in low time-steps. Furthermore, for the more challenging remote sensing detection task, we propose a confidence-based instance weighting scheme, which substantially improves adaptation performance in the detection task. To our knowledge, this work is the first to address the online adaptation of SNNs. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets across classification, segmentation, and detection tasks demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing domain adaptation and domain generalization approaches under varying weather conditions. The proposed method enables energy-efficient and fast online adaptation on edge devices, and has much potential in applications such as remote perception on on-orbit satellites and UAV.