Objectives High-resolution agile optical satellites can continuously observe specific regions or targets, thereby realizing applications such as regional monitoring and target tracking. In order to obtain stable and high-quality video data, continuous observation data need to be geographically corrected and stabilized. This process requires a large amount of calculation, but the on-board computing and storage device cannot meet the demand. Therefore, this process can only be completed afterwards by on-ground system, resulting in a significant delay in information acquisition.

Methods This paper proposes an object-space-consistency-based real-time stabilization approach for Luojia3-01 satellite video data, which is based on data characteristics and computing capability of embedded on-board hardware. The proposed approach employs real-time geometric positioning to extract and correct the region of interest (ROI) in real-time during satellite imaging. Additionally, it employs the consistency of geographical information in real-time align adjacent image frames to ensure the relative accuracy between sequence frames. On the basis, it generates a sequence of video frames of ROI with geographical encoding in real-time through the construction of a parallel pipeline of algorithms.

Results The experiments are conducted by the actual data of Luojia3-01 satellite with the frame rate of 6 frame per second, and the proposed approach can realize the faster processing based on the embedded on-board processing hardware. Furthermore, the obtained video frame sequence with geographic encoding and the inter-frame stabilized accuracy is better than 0.328 pixels.

Conclusions The proposed approach can meet the requirements of on-board real-time service.