High-Level Synthesis of a Single/Multi-Band Optical and SAR Image Compression and Encryption Hardware Accelerator

Transmitting images from earth observation satellites to ground is a major challenge, and a compression/encryption stage is actually mandatory. Development of hardware accelerators is highly recommended, both to relieve the software from such demanding task, and to improve performance, aiming at quasi-real-time data processing. To this end, we discuss the design, development, deployment and test of a FPGA-based accelerator, featuring a lossless and lossy (near-lossless) compression, including the data encryption too. Its architecture is well suited for different image types, including single- and multi-band optical and SAR images and can be fully run-time configurable. Measured performance showed a throughput of 10 Msamples/s, in agreement with related state-of-the-art works, focused on lossless compression only.