Real-time Remote Sensing Video Compression for On-orbit Heterogeneous Platform

With the rapid advancement of optical remote sensing (RS) satellites, RS video has replaced RS image as the main way to obtain information in orbit environment. However, the storage and transmission of on-orbit RS video faces enormous challenges: the contradiction between limited power, space and bandwidth and massive video data volume is becoming increasingly acute. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an effective implementation of spaceborne real-time RS video compression based on CPU+GPU heterogeneous framework. First, we propose a new rate control method based on HEVC for on-orbit RS video compression, which allocates less bitrate for low complexity code blocks (CBs) and more bitrate for high complexity CBs, which can improve the accuracy of rate control algorithm while ensuring compression quality. Then this paper makes full use of the CPU + GPU heterogeneous framework to speed up the whole compression processing. The experimental results show that the proposed compression framework realizes 200x real-time compression of 1080p spaceborne RS video with a PSNR greater than 38.7 dB.