Optimum data transmission and imaging method for high resolution imaging from Earth observation satellite

Abstract

Recently, an enormous amount of progress has been made in remote sensing imaging, providing images in the ground pixel size resolution and spectral band width resolution. These imaging methods are very important and indispensable for the progress of remote sensing from space. With this progress, the data rates from satellites are extensively increasing. The typical value of the net data rate exceeds 1 Gbps, not including any synchronous code nor error correcting code. Therefore, the high performance data expression should be indispensable especially in the high resolution observation system. This paper reports the optimum transmission system using the data compression and the error correction code under the above circumstances. There are many kinds of data compression techniques, however we need accurate and high signal to noise ratio of compressed images for Earth observation. This paper mainly considers the JPEG2000 compression method. In the transmission of compressed data, the effects of bit error would be very important and sometimes fatally damages the image quality. Accordingly, error correction would be indispensable for high quality data transmission. The paper mainly discusses error correction using the Turbo code, and shows the effect of error disappearance in the receiving data of the compressed image. Finally, the paper proposes the time integration method and improvement of the signal to noise ratio of original images.