Satellite imagery is only valuable if it arrives at the analyst quickly enough to inform a decision. For time-sensitive applications — emergency response, agricultural event detection, infrastructure monitoring — a 24-hour imagery delivery cycle is operationally useless. LaythTech's target for Earth observation missions is sub-five-minute delivery from sensor capture to analyst workstation.
The Compression Problem
A single high-resolution scene from our optical payload generates approximately 2.8GB of raw sensor data. The X-band downlink capacity during a typical 7-minute contact window is approximately 800MB. Without compression, we can downlink less than 30% of the available imagery during a single pass.
The Folding Pipeline Architecture
We call it a "folding" pipeline because it applies multiple compression stages that each fold the data volume without introducing perceptual artifacts that would degrade the imagery's analytical utility. The result is a net 4.3:1 compression ratio with zero perceptual degradation at analyst workstation resolution.
