Performance Assessment of the CCSDS-123 Standard for Panchromatic Video Compression on Space Missions

The use of next-generation and high-resolution imaging sensors is gaining interest for space missions, because of their properties for identification and exploration purposes. It is expected that the demand for video sensors in the space industry will increase during the next years, mainly for monitoring and exploration missions. In this context, onboard video compression techniques emerge as mandatory, because memory resources are available on space missions and the downlink bandwidth with ground prevents for the transmission of raw video, especially when near real-time capabilities are required. The complexity of the current commercial video encoders supposes a challenge for their implementation on the hardware used on space missions, because of their high architectural complexity and computational requirements, deriving in an area overhead and an unacceptable power consumption. In this context, we propose the use of the CCSDS-123.0-B-2 standard, originally focused on the near-lossless on-board compression of multispectral and hyperspectral images, for compressing panchromatic video. The proposed solution presents low complexity, because it is specifically designed for working on space missions and also has the capability of compressing both 3-D images and panchromatic video by using a single processing core. Results demonstrate that this solution achieves high compression ratios, maintaining a considerable video quality after reconstruction on ground and achieving a fine-grain control of the losses introduced in the compression chain.