Design and Implementation of On-orbit Valuable Image Extraction for the TianZhi-1 Satellite

Recently, software-defined satellite has become a research hotspot in the aerospace. Based on an advanced computing platform with open system architecture, researchers can upload software for specific tasks even the satellite has been launched into space. This paper we have designed an on-orbit application for China’s first software-defined satellite TianZhi-1, which use Android smartphone as a system platform. Two main tasks are focused on our work, one is to reduce data redundancy and the other is to compress the size of the software. First, a light-weight and extensible framework is designed to support different image processing algorithms. Following this, we propose a three-step approach for on-orbit valuable image extraction, include image denoising, stitching, and salient object extraction. Experiments on the real satellite achieve outstanding results.