Onboard image selection for small-satellite based remote sensing mission

The contradiction that imaging system can acquire huge amount of image data while communication system can deliver only a very small part of them has become a bottleneck for the small-satellite based earth observation. In this paper, a novel onboard image selection strategy is designed to select most informative images that are acquired by the imaging system for transmission. Specifically, the image that is worst reconstructed by previously transmitted images, instead of the instantly acquired image, is selected since it possesses most distinguishing information to previously transmitted images. Experiment on simulated image sequence has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed onboard image selection algorithm.