Cubesat Filtering
FILTERING
Since we can only transmit 100 images a day but we take 25 images every second, we need some way to choose which images we store and transmit and which images we throw away. We chose three different methods that we are going to implement in order to filter our data. The first method is to throw out 24 of the 25 images every second. We are going to spinning around an axis at up to five degrees per second, but this will not change our image enough to justify the memory we would need to process all 25 images. The second method is to only take images when the satellite is over places we are interested in. This is an effective way of filtering our data, but only once we have trajectory information. NASA and the Air Force provide this information for all objects in space, but it takes a couple of days or weeks to gather enough data for our model to be accurate. Finally, we only want images where we are pointed towards the Earth, so we are developing an algorithm that checks how many extreme values are in the image and throws out any with a high count. This should work because extreme lows indicate space and extreme highs indicate sun, neither of which we are interested in.
