High Definition Image Pre-Processing System for Multi-Stripe Satellites' Image Sensors

High-resolution image sensors play an important role in today's satellites' remote sensing applications. This paper presents an image recombination and processing system for one-dimensional multi-strip complementary metal-oxide semiconductor image sensors (CISs.) The proposed system takes advantage of the satellites' linear moving property to control the exposure time of CIS and provides the real-time ability to generate 11 200× N high-resolution images for satellites' remote sensing. Using hardware accelerators coupled with versatile microprocessors, the architecture is able to offer processing capability as well as long-term maintainability for space-borne platforms. The details of hardware design to meet real-time requirement are presented. The prototype, which contains four strip CISs and field programmable gate array-based prototyping, was implemented to verify functionality and capability of real-time image acquisition and combination. The implementation results show that it is feasible to integrate the proposed system into a single chip.