NAVI-Orbital: First In-Orbit Demonstration of a Zero-Shot Vision-Language Model for Autonomous Earth Observation

As Earth Observation data generation outpaces downlink bandwidth and human-in-the-loop processing, a widening gap has emerged between onboard collection and actionable ground intelligence. This paper presents NAVI-Orbital, a software system deployed on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) spacecraft. On April 16, 2026, NAVI-Orbital achieved what is, to the authors' knowledge, the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multi-modal inference entirely onboard. NAVI-Orbital uses a local vision-language model (Gemma 3) to classify each captured scene, produce a text description of its content and the relationships between its features, and respond to operator follow-up via natural-language dialogue. The system is re-tasked through plain-English prompts in place of conventional command sequences, and is orchestrated by a graph-based state machine (LangGraph) coordinating dedicated agents for detection and dialogue. Results across ground benchmarking (88.16% accuracy on the 7,960-image curated AID benchmark), Flatsat validation, and live in-orbit captures of newly acquired, previously unseen Earth imagery (including uncorrected YAM-9 imagery, processed onboard with hardware-accelerated GPU inference and no fine-tuning for the flight instrument) demonstrate the feasibility of running foundation models on satellite-class edge computers to invert the conventional acquire-then-downlink-everything bandwidth profile through semantic compression of Earth observations in-orbit.

Adaptive Transform Coding for Semantic Compression

Visual data compression is shifting from human-centered reconstruction to machine-oriented representation coding. In this setting, an image is often mapped to a compact semantic embedding, which is then compressed and transmitted for downstream inference. We propose an adaptive transform-coding method for semantic-feature compression motivated by the conditional rate-distortion function of a Gaussian mixture model. The scheme uses mode-dependent transforms and quantizers selected according to the inferred source component, enabling more efficient coding of heterogeneous feature distributions. Evaluations on features from widely used vision backbones and foundation models show that the proposed method outperforms or is competitive with state-of-the-art neural compression methods while preserving flexibility and interpretability.