Multi-Sensor Image Registration, Fusion and Dimension Reduction

With the development of future spacecraft formations comes a number of complex challenges such as maintaining precise relative position and specified attitudes, as well as being able to communicate with each other. More generally, with the advent of spacecraft formations, issues related to performing on-board and automatic data computing and analysis as well as decision planning and scheduling will figure among the most important requirements. Among those, automatic image registration, image fusion and dimension reduction represent intelligent technologies that would reduce mission costs, would enable autonomous decisions to be taken on-board, and would make formation flying adaptive, self-reliant, and cooperative. For both on-board and on-the-ground applications, the particular need for dimension reduction is two-fold, first to reduce the communication bandwidth, second as a pre-processing to make computations feasible, simpler and faster.