The Effect Analysis of Compression Method on KOMPSAT Image Chain

Multi-Spectral Camera(MSC) on the KOMPSAT-2 satellite was developed and launched as a main payload to provide 1m of GSD(Ground Sampling Distance) for one(1) channel panchromatic imaging and 4m of GSD for four(4) channel multi-spectral imaging at 685km altitude covering l5km of swath width. Since the compression on MSC image chain was required to overcome the mismatch between input data rate and output date rate JPEG-like method was selected and analyzed to check the influence on the performance. In normal operation the MSC data is being acquired and transmitted with lossy compression ratio to cover whole image channel and full swath width in real-time. In the other hand the MSC performance have carefully been handled to avoid or minimize any degradation so that it was analyzed and restored in KGS(KOMPSAT Ground Station) during LEOP(Launch and Early Operation Phase). While KOMPSAT-2 had been developed, new compression method based upon wavelet for space application was introduced and available for next satellite. The study on improvement of image chain including new compression method is asked for next KOMPSAT which requires better GSD and larger swath width In this paper, satellite image chain which consists of on-board image chain and on-ground image chain including general MSC description is briefly described. The performance influences on the image chain between two on-board compression methods which are or will be used for KOMPSAT are analyzed. The differences on performance between two methods are compared and the better solution for the performance improvement of image chain on KOMPSAT is suggested.