Fast and adaptive lossless on-board hyperspectral data compression system for space applications
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Aranki, Nazeeh; Bakhshi, Alireza; Keymeulen, Didier; Klimesh, Matthew
- Source
- 2009 IEEE Aerospace conference Aerospace conference, 2009 IEEE. :1-8 Mar, 2009
- Subject
- Aerospace
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Hyperspectral imaging
Data compression
Field programmable gate arrays
Hardware
Downlink
Instruments
NASA
Data mining
Object recognition
Adaptive filters
- Language
- ISSN
- 1095-323X
Efficient on-board lossless hyperspectral data compression reduces data volume in order to meet NASA and DoD limited downlink capabilities. The technique also improves signature extraction, object recognition and feature classification capabilities by providing exact reconstructed data on constrained downlink resources. At JPL a novel, adaptive and predictive technique for lossless compression of hyperspectral data was recently developed. This technique uses an adaptive filtering method and achieves a combination of low complexity and compression effectiveness that far exceeds state-of-the-art techniques currently in use. The JPL-developed ‘Fast Lossless’ algorithm requires no training data or other specific information about the nature of the spectral bands for a fixed instrument dynamic range. It is of low computational complexity and thus well-suited for implementation in hardware, which makes it practical for flight implementations of pushbroom instruments. A prototype of the compressor (and decompressor) of the algorithm is available in software, but this implementation may not meet speed and real-time requirements of some space applications. Hardware acceleration provides performance improvements of 10x–100x vs. the software implementation (about 1M samples/sec on a Pentium IV machine). This paper describes a hardware implementation of the ‘Fast Lossless’ compression algorithm on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The FPGA implementation targets the current state-of-the-art FPGAs (Xilinx Virtex IV and V families) and compresses one sample every clock cycle to provide a fast and practical real-time solution for Space applications.