Closing the Loop on Contrail Avoidance with Satellite Verification
Contrails are the thin ice clouds that aircraft leave behind.
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Key points
- However, an avoided contrail only counts if a satellite can confirm that it never formed, and this check is hard: contrails are one to two pixels wide, cover only 0.18% of pixels, and look very similar to natural cirrus.
- We build a small diffusion model (8.4M parameters, trained on one GPU) that detects them, and we run a controlled study to find out which components matter.
- First, check the input resolution before designing a new architecture.
- Third, pretraining the model on contrail shapes is harmful: the model learns that thin strokes appear everywhere and paints them onto empty scenes.
Sources (1)
- [1]Closing the Loop on Contrail Avoidance with Satellite VerificationarXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 7, 03:18 AM
Contrails are the thin ice clouds that aircraft leave behind.
However, an avoided contrail only counts if a satellite can confirm that it never formed, and this check is hard: contrails are one to two pixels wide, cover only 0.18% of pixels, and look very similar to natural cirrus.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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