Design, implementation and optimization of a Time Delay and Integration software code

Details

Supervisors

Legat, Jean-Didier

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électricien, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

In the modern world, technologies evolve very quickly. They always fascinate and impress, from the smallest to the largest. A rapidly growing field in recent years is space exploitation. Driven by the desire of going even further, even faster and undertake bigger projects. One of the objectives in space is the realization of pictures of the Earth. Who has never been blown away by our beautiful blue planet? These beautiful images of the Earth are made possible by satellite imagery. We want ever more beautiful images, with the highest resolution and impeccable quality. All this must be done in satellites with a high but fixed speed and therefore a very low shutter time. The time available to the image sensor to capture photons is therefore very low. A method to improve this image capture is to use an image sensor with Time Delay and Integration (TDI). The objective of adding TDI is to be able to capture areas or objects with constant movement and low brightness. A final image with sufficient brightness will be made by combining several of these low light rate images. This allows to decrease the capture time while maintaining or increasing the resolution. This master thesis, realized in collaboration with Aerospacelab, has two main objectives. The first one is to analyze and describe the different types of TDI that exist. The second is to design a version of TDI in software, to implement it and then to optimize it.