Implementation of data compression scheme for SAR payload on small satellites
Haroon Ahammed, M. Thiruchelvi, Dhiraj Kumar Singh · 2020
This paper reports on a data compression scheme that can be used to reduce the data rate from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payload on small satellites. A straight forward recording of the imaging data results in very high data rates of the order 5 Gbps which causes complexities in the payload satellite interface and will consume onboard data storage rapidly, thus limiting the number of imaging operations that can be stored on board. A scheme for data rate reduction, namely Block Adaptive Quantization (BAQ) can be implemented to put the data rates well within bandwidth at the same time meeting image quality requirements of SAR payloads.