Lossy compression of hyperspectral images based on noise parameters estimation and variance stabilizing transform

A problem of lossy compression of hyperspectral images is considered. A specific aspect is that we assume a signal-dependent model of noise for data acquired by new generation sensors. Moreover, a signal-dependent component of the noise is assumed dominant compared to a signal-independent noise component. Sub-band (component-wise) lossy compression is studied first, and it is demonstrated that optimal operation point (OOP) can exist. For such OOP, the mean square error between compressed and noise-free images attains global or, at least, local minimum, i.e., a good effect of noise removal (filtering) is reached. In practice, we show how compression in the neighborhood of OOP can be carried out, when a noise-free image is not available. Two approaches for reaching this goal are studied. First, lossy compression directly applied to the original data is considered. According to another approach, lossy compression is applied to images after direct variance stabilizing transform (VST) with properly adjusted parameters. Inverse VST has to be performed only after data decompression. It is shown that the second approach has certain advantages. One of them is that the quantization step for a coder can be set the same for all sub-band images. This offers favorable prerequisites for applying three-dimensional (3-D) methods of lossy compression for sub-band images combined into groups after VST. Two approaches to 3-D compression, based on the discrete cosine transform, are proposed and studied. A first approach presumes obtaining the reference and "difference" images for each group. A second performs compression directly for sub-images in a group. We show that it is a good choice to have 16 sub-images in each group. The abovementioned approaches are tested for Hyperion hyperspectral data. It is demonstrated that the compression ratio of about 15-20 can be provided for hyperspectral image compression in the neighborhood of OOP for 3-D coders, which is sufficiently larger than for component-wise compression and lossless coding. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.