Onboard Deployment of Remote Sensing Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Review of Architecture, Optimization, and Hardware

With the rapid growth of multimodal remote sensing (RS) data, there is an increasing demand for intelligent onboard computing to alleviate the transmission and latency bottlenecks of traditional orbit-to-ground downlinking workflows. While many lightweight AI algorithms have been widely developed and deployed for onboard inference, their limited generalization capability restricts performance under the diverse and dynamic conditions of advanced Earth observation. Recent advances in remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) offer a promising solution by providing pretrained representations with strong adaptability across diverse tasks and modalities. However, the deployment of RSFMs onboard resource-constrained devices such as nano satellites remains a significant challenge due to strict limitations in memory, energy, computation, and radiation tolerance. To this end, this review proposes the first comprehensive survey of onboard RSFMs deployment, where a unified deployment pipeline including RSFMs development, model compression techniques, and hardware optimization is introduced and surveyed in detail. Available hardware platforms are also discussed and compared, based on which some typical case studies for low Earth orbit (LEO) CubeSats are presented to analyze the feasibility of onboard RSFMs’ deployment. To conclude, this review aims to serve as a practical roadmap for future research on the deployment of RSFMs on edge devices, bridging the gap between the large-scale RSFMs and the resource constraints of spaceborne platforms for onboard computing.