Design of High-Resolution Space Imaging System on Sandroid CubeSat using camera array

Abstract

Upgrading hardware and post-process are two usually used methods to alleviate the low-resolution problem of Space imaging. However, the former produces an expensive cost and increases not only the development cycle but also volume and weight of CubeSat, and the latter causes large transmission of data flow and is very time-consuming. To solve the problems above, in this paper, we design a High-Resolution Space Imaging System using 2×2 camera array for Sandroid CubeSat. By making full use of superior on-board computing capability, our system realizes the goal of obtaining high-resolution (HR) image using a smaller, lighter, cheaper camera. Our work is organized as follows. Firstly, we briefly introduce the progress of CubeSat and the space imaging low-resolution problem. Secondly, we details the arrangement of camera array in a parallel plane for Sandroid CubeSat. Also, the improved HR image recovery approach which mainly applies the proposed Sandroid scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm to enhance the space-borne processing efficiency is illustrated. Then, the experiment results are presented from visual assessment and objective measures. What's more, according to the comprehensive analysis of results, there are several advantages of this system such as HR images obtainment, the faster on-board processing speed, time degradation and flow reduction in the data transmission from CubeSat to the ground station. The designed High-Resolution Space Imaging System is effective to be applied to Sandroid CubeSat, meanwhile, it achieves the target of using a simpler, smaller, lighter, cheaper camera to obtain HR image.