Methane Detection On Board Satellites from Unorthorectified Imagery

Abstract

As a potent greenhouse gas, methane is a major driver of climate change. Its effective mitigation relies on timely detection. Conventional detection methods rely on orthorectification to correct geometric distortions and matched filters to enhance plume signals, which are steps designed for ground processing and poorly suited to onboard execution. We introduce UnorthoDOS, a dataset and approach for training machine learning models directly on unorthorectified hyperspectral imagery, bypassing both orthorectification and matched-filter products. Our U-Net models trained on unorthorectified data approach the performance of models trained on orthorectified data (IoU 16.91% vs. 18.47% on all plumes), while both substantially outperform the mag1c matched-filter baseline (IoU 4.76%). We further demonstrate the feasibility of onboard deployment: FP16 compression halves model size with under 0.3% output deviation. The trained ML models and two ML-ready datasets -- orthorectified and unorthorectified hyperspectral imagery from the EMIT sensor -- are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SpaceML/UnorthoDOS, with code at https://github.com/spaceml-org/plume-hunter.