As part of its small satellite R&D activities, Spar Aerospace Limited is studying the applicability of onboard real-time data compression to solve some problems of data storage onboard small satellites and of data delivery to remote users. To fulfill this goal, a collaboration was established with the University of Surrey Spacecraft Engineering Unit to test Spar's compression code on UoSAT-5 EIS images and have it ultimately executed onboard UoSAT-5. Image compression of the UoSAT-5 remote sensing data has been achieved by a number of algorithms including lossy methods such as the `discrete cosine transform' (DCT) related to the JPEG standard, the `block truncation' (BT), the `vector quantization (VQ) as well as lossless compression methods.

Date Published: 16 September 1993
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 1940, Small Satellite Technology and Applications III, (16 September 1993); doi: 10.1117/12.156640

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1940:
Small Satellite Technology and Applications III
Brian J. Horais, Editor(s)