An Extremely Pipelined FPGA Implementation of a Lossy Hyperspectral Image Compression Algorithm

Segmented and pipelined execution has been a staple of computing for the past decades. Operations over different values can be carried out at the same time speeding up computations. Hyperspectral image compression sequentially processes samples, exploiting local redundancies to generate a predictable data stream that can be compressed. In this article, we take advantage of a low complexity predictive lossy compression algorithm which can be executed over an extremely long pipeline of hundreds of stages. We can avoid most stalls and maintain throughput close to the theoretical maximum. The different steps operate over integers with simple arithmetic operations, so they are especially well-suited for our FPGA implementation. Results on a Virtex-7 show a maximum frequency of over 300 MHz for a throughput of over 290 MB/s, with a space-qualified Virtex-5 reaching 258 MHz, being five times as fast as the previous FPGA designs. This shows that a modular pipelined approach is beneficial for these kinds of compression algorithms.