Performance Evaluation of Video Codecs in the Space Environment

In human missions to other planets and natural satellites (e.g., return to the Moon and future missions to Mars), there will be a need to provide video services for such functions as monitoring analysis, personal private video conversations and general public outreach. There is a desire to provide these services by leveraging terrestrial Internet concepts and technology. In this work we focus on the video performance mechanisms as they are impacted in a space environment where long range latencies and bit errors arise in the wireless/RF links. We provide results from experiments using open source implementations of commercial video standards. Both Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM) are used as a performance metrics.