Abstract
The integration of video sensors on-board satellites is becoming a trend in the space industry, since they provide extra information in the temporal domain when compared with traditional remote sensing imaging acquisition equipment. The inclusion of the temporal dimension together with the constant increase in the sensor resolution supposes a challenge for on-board processing, taking into account the limited computational and storage resources on-board satellites and that it is unfeasible to directly transmit raw video to ground, due to downlink bandwidth limitations. For these reasons, on-board video compression is needed. However, the inherent complexity of the video encoders used on ground limits their implementation on environments with high constraints in terms of computational burden, area, and power consumption. This article proposes an extended compression chain that implements as compression core the CCSDS 123.0-B-2 standard, originally developed for near-lossless compression of multi- and hyperspectral images. In addition, some preprocessing stages are included to manage the temporal dimension of RGB videos efficiently. The proposed solution guarantees low complexity and flexibility to compress both multi- and hyperspectral images and panchromatic and RGB videos by using a single compression instance, which is adapted by adding or removing the appropriate stages. Results demonstrate the viability of this solution to be implemented on space payloads, since high compression ratios are achieved without incurring in a penalty in terms of video quality.
Highlights
V IDEO sensors are gaining interest in order to be embarked on-board satellites, as remote sensing instruments that provide information of the spatial dimension, and in the temporal domain, capturing data continuously that allow new on-board applications, such as disaster monitoring, or target detection and tracking in real-time [1]
Targeting RGB and multispectral on-board video compression, a tailored version of commercial video encoder widely used on ground applications, such as the H.264/AVC specification [6], could be adapted to work on-board satellites, as it is recommended by the space agencies for real-time applications with data transmissions up to 25 Mb/s [7]
After an exhaustive parameter tuning to characterize the different Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) 123.0-B-2 compression parameters, the configuration summarized in Table I is used, since it is the one that provides the best results in terms of compression ratedistortion ratios for RGB videos, and for grayscale video compression, as reflected in [26]
Summary
V IDEO sensors are gaining interest in order to be embarked on-board satellites, as remote sensing instruments that provide information of the spatial dimension, and in the temporal domain, capturing data continuously that allow new on-board applications, such as disaster monitoring, or target detection and tracking in real-time [1]. Results in terms of decompressed image quality are promising, adaptations for a video acquisition scenario are required to take into account temporal information, at the same time that complexity should be reduced to be embarked on satellites Due to all these reasons, a different strategy has been followed in the presented approach, which focuses on the development of a new video compression algorithm designed for being efficiently executed on-board satellites. This solution is able to deal with all the requirements imposed by remote sensing applications, such as both an acceptable compression ratio and video quality after reconstruction, without incurring in a penalty in terms of architectural complexity and power consumption. The algorithm proposed is focused on the near-lossless compression of multi- and hyperspectral images, and it is comprised by two main stages: a predictive-based approach for spectral and spatial decorrelation and an entropy coder, whose main purpose is to represent the input prediction residuals with the minimum possible number of bits but ensuring at the same time a proper decompression
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