Video Compression for Lunar Imaging

NASA seeks a novel technique for transmitting high-quality imagery from the Moon to Earth. Currently, both the quality and quantity of imagery is limited due to the difficulty of imaging a lunar scene; restricted size, weight, and power (SWaP) on the Moon; and low available bandwidth. We propose to develop the Lunar Event System (LES), which incorporates an event camera to reduce overall power requirements, identify scenes of interest, automate acquisition settings, reduce transmitted data size, and increase the quality of the final imagery product. In Phase I, we will prove the feasibility of this approach through software development, representative data acquisition, and algorithm validation. We will acquire data with both traditional and event cameras of scenes representative of the Moon for algorithm development and validation. We will compress the data streams from both cameras using state-of-the-art techniques with low-SWaP hardware. Finally, we will develop novel techniques for combining imagery and event data to enhance imagery quality and validate these techniques on the acquired data.