On-Board Compression of Multispectral Images for Small Satellites

Compression reduces the amount of data to be sent to ground whilst preserving its content, allowing a lower bit-rate link to be used or more data to be sent over the same link. This paper presents the results of an investigation into image compression methods for multispectral images for use on board small satellites. An error resilient compression scheme is proposed and implemented. A modification of a neural network based data compression method is discussed. The investigated compression methods are compared in terms of error resilience, compression ratio and execution time.