Multispectral and Hyperspectral Lossless Compressor for Space Applications (HyLoC): A Low-Complexity FPGA Implementation of the CCSDS 123 Standard

An efficient compression of hyperspectral images on-board satellites is mandatory in current and future space missions in order to save bandwidth and storage space. Reducing the data volume in space is a challenge that has been faced with a twofold approach: to propose new highly efficient compression algorithms; and to present technologies and strategies to execute the compression in the hardware available on-board. The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), a consortium of the major space agencies in the world, has recently issued the CCSDS 123 standard for multispectral and hyperspectral image (MHI) compression, with the aim of facilitating the inclusion of on-board compression on satellites by the space industry. In this paper, we present a low-complexity feld programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) implementation of this recent CCSDS 123 standard, which demonstrates its main features in terms of compression efficiency and suitability for an implementation on the available on-board technologies. A hardware architecture is conceived and designed with the aim of achieving low hardware occupancy and high performance on a space-qualified FPGA from the Microsemi RTAX family. The resulting FPGA implementation is therefore suitable for on-board compression. The effect of the several CCSDS-123 configuration parameters on the compression efficiency and hardware complexity is taken into consideration to provide flexibility in such a way that the implementation can be adapted to different application scenarios. Synthesis results show a very low occupancy of 34% and a maximum frequency of 43 MHz on a space-qualified RTAX1000S. The benefits of the proposed implementation are further evidenced by a demonstrator, which is implemented on a commercial prototyping board from Xilinx. Finally, a comparison with other FPGA implementations of on-board data compression algorithms is provided.