Design of camera array interface using FPGA for nanosatellite remote sensing payload

Image quality is one of the important aspects in nanosatellite remote sensing missions. Image quality parameters, such as image detail and coverage area, have to be taken into consideration in designing nanosatellite remote sensing payload while limited mass, dimension, and power consumption of nanosatellite add another constraint. Lengthening the lens focal length of the camera can increase the image detail but this causes the smaller coverage area of the image. To maintain the detailed image with wide coverage area, the concept of synthetic aperture optical imaging is used in this research. Synthetic aperture optical imaging is a concept that combines images from array of camera capturing the same object from various angles. FPGA XuLA2 LX9 is used as On Board Data Handling (OBDH) in this research to increase the performance. The system built in this research is synthetic aperture optical imaging with 2 × 2 cameras, using LS Y201 camera modules which produces JPEG image with VGA resolution 640 × 480 pixels. The result achieved in this research is image with resolution 1280 × 960 pixels produced by 4 cameras with resolution 640 × 480 pixels with the average time of fetching the image data is 27.58498 s for low compressed image and 11.1972 s for high compressed image.