An FPGA Accelerator for Real-Time Lossy Compression of Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral images offer great possibilities for remote studies, but can be difficult to manage due to their size. Compression helps with storage and transmission, and many efforts have been made towards standardizing compression algorithms, especially in the lossless and near-lossless domains. For long term storage, lossy compression is also of interest, but its complexity has kept it away from real-time performance. In this paper, JYPEC, a lossy hyperspectral compression algorithm that combines PCA and JPEG2000, is accelerated using an FPGA. A tier 1 coder (a key step and the most time-consuming in JPEG2000 compression) was implemented in a heavily pipelined fashion. Results showed a performance comparable to that of existing 0.18 mu m CMOS implementations, all while keeping a small footprint on FPGA resources. This enabled the acceleration of the most complex step of JYPEC, bringing the total execution time below the real-time constraint.