Technology Overview: A Deployed Airborne HSI Processing System

Multi-spectral and hyperspectral sensors have been deployed on airborne platforms for many years. Typical scenarios for airborne collection of spectral data involve over-flights of target areas followed by ground-based data calibration and exploitation. With the advent of flight-qualified, high-performance, parallel computing hardware, however, practical near real-time processing and exploitation of hyperspectral data are now possible. This paper presents an overview of hyperspectral processing and analysis, and discusses an integrated algorithm, computational processing, and hardware approach to achieve near real-time performance. Initial results are presented. INTRODUCTION This overview of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) describes current applications of HSI, followed by an analysis of system resources, particularly computational and bandwidth requirements. This paper also presents the initial results of an algorithm port to parallel computing hardware. Related published works are cited for further investigation.