FPGA support for satellite computations of hyper spectral images

Satellites gather information from different sensors and send it using a temporal connection with very limited bandwidth. The bandwidth demand can be highly reduced if the satellite preprocesses the data and only sends relevant information. FPGAs offer the necessary flexibility and performance to carry out this preprocessing step. We have designed and implemented the well-known PPI algorithm for hyper spectral images providing better performance than previous HW implementations and reducing the penalties due to the I/O communications. We have also included a HW module for random number generation. The results show that our system can preprocess a hyper spectral image in a few seconds.