An Efficient FPGA Implementation of a Simple Lossless Algorithm (SLA) for On-board Satellite Hyperspectral Data Compression

On-board satellite hyperspectral imagery (HSI) is characterized by a large amount of data acquisition with decreasing ground sample distance and limited resources on-board to meet relatively stable channel bandwidth requirements. This paper presents an efficient hardware architecture of a simple lossless algorithm (SLA) for on-board satellite hyperspectral data compression in band sequential (BSQ) order. The architecture uses an efficient data handling block along with the pipelined implementation of the pre-processing stage to improve the throughput. Kintex KCU-105 evaluation board is used to implement the architecture for testing with standard datasets from the Consultative Committee for Space Data System (CCSDS) corpus of data for HSI. Throughput, power, and resource utilization are compared with the hardware implementations of the CCSDS 123.0-B-1 standard. SLA shows real-time deployment capabilities by achieving a throughput of ~3.8 Gbps 238 MHz clock frequency with lesser resource utilization and affirm as a low complexity lossless alternative for on-board satellite hyperspectral data compression.