Swarun Kumar

This paper presents SelfieStick, a novel satellite receiver system that explores reducing this barrier of access to real-time satellite imagery data using a single low cost (under 30 dollars) tiny receiver. SelfieStick’s core approach takes advantage of the multiplicity of overhead Low-Earth Orbit satellites due to their exponential rise in recent years. While signals from such satellites may be individually weak, especially at a low-cost receiver, SelfieStick stitches together noisy RF captures containing underlying images of the same part of the Earth across many such satellites to generate clean Earth images. A detailed experimental evaluation on the RTL-SDR platform on satellite captures from the NOAA constellation demonstrates a PSNR improvement of 5 dB through combining of images across 10 satellites.