Resilience Improvements for Space-Based Radio Frequency Machine Learning

Recent work has quantified the degradations that occur in convolutional neural nets (CNN) deployed in harsh environments like space-based image or radio frequency (RF) processing applications. Such degradations yield a robust correlation and causality between single-event upset (SEU) induced errors in memory weights of on-orbit CNN implementations. However, minimal considerations have been given to how the resilience of CNNs can be improved algorithmically as opposed to via enhanced hardware. This paper focuses on RF-processing CNNs and performs an in-depth analysis of applying software-based error detection and correction mechanisms, which may subsequently be combined with protections of radiation-hardened processor platforms. These techniques are more accessible for low cost smallsat platforms than ruggedized hardware. Additionally, methods for minimizing the memory and computational complexity of the resulting resilience techniques are identified. Combined with periodic scrubbing, the resulting techniques are shown to improve expected lifetimes of CNN-based RF-processing algorithms by several orders of magnitude.