On the realtime satellite image compression of X-Sat

The transmission of image data acquired by remote sensing missions based on spaceborne platforms is a major bottleneck. It results from limited power on-board, the huge volume of the data, and the number of accessible ground receiving stations. In particular these arguments hold true for small satellites that face additional design constraints in terms of size, mass and cost. To relax the downlink restriction image compression has to be applied. This paper analyses the architecture and requirements for the minisatellite X-Sat and sets them in relation with selected compression algorithms. Due to the realtime nature of the mission, i.e. simultaneous imaging and downlinking, only hardware-based solutions are considered. The investigation addresses the issues of achievable compression ratios and guaranteeing lossless compression.

[1]  P.G. Howard,et al.  Fast and efficient lossless image compression , 1993, [Proceedings] DCC `93: Data Compression Conference.

[2]  Khalid Sayood,et al.  Introduction to Data Compression , 1996 .

[3]  Ian McLoughlin,et al.  Fault tolerance through redundant COTS components for satellite processing applications , 2003, Fourth International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing, 2003 and the Fourth Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia. Proceedings of the 2003 Joint.

[4]  PenShu Yeh.  Implementation of CCSDS Lossless Data Compression for Space and Data Archive Applications , 2002 .

[5]  E. A. Korany,et al.  Prediction model selection for compression of satellite images , 1996, Thirteenth National Radio Science Conference. NRSC '96.

[6]  Joan L. Mitchell,et al.  Optimal Hardware and Software Arithmetic Coding Procedures for the Q-Coder , 1988, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[7]  Guillermo Sapiro,et al.  LOCO-I: a low complexity, context-based, lossless image compression algorithm , 1996, Proceedings of Data Compression Conference - DCC '96.

[8]  B. Carpentieri,et al.  Lossless image coding via adaptive linear prediction and classification , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[9]  Seongmo Park,et al.  Reusable design of run length coder for image compression application , 1999, AP-ASIC'99. First IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on ASICs (Cat. No.99EX360).

[10]  E. C. Tan,et al.  Comparison of lossless image compression algorithms , 1999, Proceedings of IEEE. IEEE Region 10 Conference. TENCON 99. 'Multimedia Technology for Asia-Pacific Information Infrastructure' (Cat. No.99CH37030).