Hardware Implementation of a Real-Time Image Data Compression for Satellite Remote Sensing

The image data compression is very important to reduce the image data volume and data rate for the satellite remote sensing. The chapter describes how the image data compression hardware is implemented and uses the FORMOSAT-5 Remote Sensing Instrument (RSI) as an example. The FORMOSAT-5 is an optical remote sensing satellite with 2 meters Panchromatic (PAN) image resolution and 4 meters Multi-Spectrum (MS) image resolution, which is under development by the National Space Organization (NSPO) in Taiwan. The payload consists of one PAN band with 12,000 pixels and four MS bands with 6,000 pixels in the remote sensing instrument. The image data compression method complies with the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) standard CCSDS 122.0-B-1 (2005). The compression ratio is 1.5 for lossless compression, 3.75 or 7.5 for lossy compression. The Xilinx Virtex-5QV FPGA, XQR5VFX130 is used to achieve near real time compression. Parallel and concurrent handling strategies are used to achieve high-performance computing in the process.