A Hardware-Friendly Hyperspectral Lossy Compressor for Next-Generation Space-Grade Field Programmable Gate Arrays

The increment in the data rate of the new-generation hyperspectral sensors is making more critical the necessity of lossy compression solutions able to achieve higher compression ratios (CRs). In this paper, a transform-based lossy compressor, namely lossy compression algorithm for hyperspectral image systems (HW-HyperLCA), is proposed as a modification of the original HyperLCA, specifically designed for being executed into space-grade field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. The HW-HyperLCA compressor can be totally executed using integer arithmetic, using different levels of precision that can be adapted for achieving the best relation between compression performance and computational burden. The experiments carried out in this paper demonstrate that the HW-HyperLCA compressor is able to compress the hyperspectral images to less than 1 bit per pixel per band with low distortions (more than 40 dB of signal-to-noise ratio) while the performed complexity analysis demonstrates that it can be efficiently executed into space-grade FPGAs using very few computational resources and good results in terms of maximum clock frequency can be obtained.