The Mission and Agile Nanosatellite for Terrestrial Imagery Service (MANTIS) is an IngeniArs project developed in collaboration with OpenCosmos (main contractor), Satlantis and Ubotica.

The aim of the MANTIS project is to exploit the potentiality of the NN directly onboard the MANTIS satellite, via a dedicated embedded hardware accelerator.

The network has been optimized to be run on Myriad-2 VPU platform.

IngeniArs has designed both the NN model and synthesised the dataset on which the model was trained. In particular, the new imager did not dispose of a sufficient number of images, requiring the synthetization of the entire training dataset.

The AI model classifier takes as input images with a bit-depth of 16 bits and returns as output the “cloudy” likelihood. The model is completely size independent.