Tomorrow’s optical Earth observation satellites should be intelligent camera systems. They should evaluate the content of an acquired satellite image scene automatically and, in case of an emergency, autonomously change their acquisition mode. Then, additional shots of the affected area can be made. To do this, large volumes of imagery have to be analysed on-board a satellite in a short period of time in which, due to the limited resources on-board a spacecraft, the power consumption of the processing unit has to be minimal. Furthermore, all algorithms on-board have to be executed in a well-defined time span, i.e. they have to be capable of performing in real-time. In this PhD thesis a programmable hardware chip, a so called Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) was used to perform the image processing. With this technology, the posed requirements can be realised. In the process, the image processing algorithms are specially customised to run on the chip in an optimal way. The algorithms developed for anomaly and pattern recognition provide, especially in case of a flooding event, useful information about the affected region. In a captured scene, water areas, islands, bridges over water and traffic on a bridge can be recognised. High-resolution panchromatic Proba-1/ HRC satellite images, as well as RapidEye imagery from the near-infrared, the blue and the red spectral region were used as data sources. Additionally, RapidEye image data of the 2011 tsunami disaster in Japan were included in the analyses. In the course of this doctoral thesis, methods were developed that are well suited for implementation on satellites due to their processing speed, real-time capability and relevance in case of catastrophes. Furthermore, they advance the spectrum of common on-board image analysis tools and demonstrate that high-level image processing is a feasible task even on a small FPGA. The obtained results are promising and provide a significant contribution to the aspired autonomy of future satellite missions.
«Tomorrow’s optical Earth observation satellites should be intelligent camera systems. They should evaluate the content of an acquired satellite image scene automatically and, in case of an emergency, autonomously change their acquisition mode. Then, additional shots of the affected area can be made. To do this, large volumes of imagery have to be analysed on-board a satellite in a short period of time in which, due to the limited resources on-board a spacecraft, the power consumption of the proc...
»