SatImg Report
Developing a Better Pico-Satellite Communication System: Part 1 - Modeling the IR Images
Abstract: In this project, we develop a MATLAB model that simulates infrared (IR) images of the Earth from old IR weather images. These images are necessary to develop and test data compression algorithms for the images of Earth taken from space using an IR camera. None of the existing databases of IR images consider the factors like the location of the satellite, orientation of the camera, etc in their images. We consider the position of the satellite along its orbit and provide the information about the exact location and orientation to the image generation module, which transforms the images in the original database to make them look like images taken from the camera at its current location. The simulations produced reasonable IR images of the Earth and these images can be further improved with a good initial database. With this realistic database of IR images, we expect to provide a good training and test dataset for the image compression algorithms, which are developed as the second part of the CubeSat project.