A Real Time Image Processing Subsystem: GEZGIN

In this study, a real-time image processing subsystem, GEZGIN, which is currently being developed for BILSAT-1, a 100kg class micro-satellite, is presented. BILSAT-1 is being constructed in accordance with a technology transfer agreement between TUBITAK-BILTEN (Turkey) and SSTL (UK) and planned to be placed into a 650 km sunsynchronous orbit in Summer 2003. GEZGIN is one of the two Turkish R&D payloads to be hosted on BILSAT-1. One of the missions of BILSAT-1 is constructing a Digital Elevation Model of Turkey using both multi-spectral and panchromatic imagers. Due to limited down-link bandwidth and on-board storage capacity, employment of a realtime image compression scheme is highly advantageous for the mission. GEZGIN has evolved as an implementation to achieve image compression tasks that would lead to an efficient utilization of both the down-link and on-board storage. The image processing on GEZGIN includes capturing of 4-band multi-spectral images of size 2048x2048 8bit pixels, compressing them simultaneously with the new industry standard JPEG2000 algorithm and forwarding the compressed multi-spectral image to Solid State Data Recorders (SSDR) of BILSAT-1 for storage and down-link transmission. The mission definition together with orbital parameters impose a 6.5 seconds constraint on real-time image compression. GEZGIN meets this constraint by exploiting the parallelism among image processing units and assigning compute intensive tasks to dedicated hardware. The proposed hardware also allows for full reconfigurability of all processing units.