GEZGIN: a case study of a real-time image processing subsystem for micro-satellites

GEZGIN is a real-time image processing subsystem, developed as an R&D payload for BILSAT-1, the first Earth observing micro-satellite of Turkey. The main functionality of GEZGIN is to compress in real-time multi-spectral images coming concurrently from the 4-band multi-spectral imager on BILSAT-1, using JPEG2000 image compression algorithm. The mission definition of BILSAT-1 imposes a 5.5 seconds interval constraint between two consecutive multi-spectral images with 20% overlap. GEZGIN fulfills this mission requirement by exploiting the parallelism among image processing units and assigning compute intensive tasks to dedicated hardware. The architecture of GEZGIN is highly integrated and fully reconfigurable allowing for the upgrade of all processing units in orbit. Hence it maintains flexibility and robustness against failures which are crucial properties for space applications. GEZGIN is built at low cost using completely "commercial-off-the-shelf" components and having performed well in all the flight readiness tests, has been successfully integrated on BILSAT-1. It is currently undergoing orbital tests.