Artificial Intelligence Based On-Board Image Compression for the Φ-Sat-2 Mission

The growing amount of data collected by Earth Observation (EO) satellites requires new processing procedures able to manage huge quantity of information. Artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) can provide advanced information also because of their ability to extract valuable information from complex data. Thanks to specific hardware platforms, these algorithms can be used also in space, opening the possibility for new procedures for intelligent data processing. The European Space Agency Φ-Sat-2 mission was designed with the purpose of demonstrating the benefits of using AI in space by running AI-based applications on-board a CubeSat. We present here the convolutional autoencoder-based algorithm developed for on-board lossy image compression of the Φ-Sat-2 mission and provide a first benchmark addressing a real space mission and a new image compression end-to-end architecture based on AI. Image compression is a crucial application that allows to save transmission bandwidth and storage. In fact, images acquired by the sensor can be compressed on-board and sent to the ground where they are reconstructed. DL algorithms have already been successfully applied for image compression however performance degradation may occur in the context of a representative on-board environment. Therefore, besides analyzing the results for the local hardware environment, this article investigates the performance variation for the on-board setting. An additional piece of innovation is the introduction of an applicative metric for the evaluation of the compression to assess the applicability of the reconstructed images for other tasks. Such metric completes those more traditional based on the original-reconstructed image similarity.