Onboard Payload-Data Dimensionality Reduction

The finer spatial, spectral and radiometric resolutions of current and planned sensors are rendering increasinglyhigh data rates which, coupled with limited on-board storage, downlink bandwidth and receiving ground station availability, make high-throughput, high-performance data-reduction techniques essential in forthcoming missions. On this paper we describe an algorithm well suited to high-dimensional data as those produced by multispectral and hyperspectral sensors, both highly relevant in a broad range of Earth Observation activities with the latter becoming increasingly available and delivering the highest data rates. The performance of parallel implementations of the algorithm on multi-core and GPU architectures is also evaluated.