A Fast Method for Very Low Bit-Rate Coding of Hyperspectral Images

In this work, we propose a computationally efficient compressive sensing based approach for very low bit rate lossy coding of hyperspectral (HS) image data by exploiting the redundancy inherent in this imaging modality. We divide the HS datacube into subsets of adjacent bands, each of which is encoded into a coded snapshot using a random code matrix. These coded snapshot images are encoded using the wavelet-based SPIHT compression technique. The decompression from the coded snapshots at the receiver is done using the orthogonal matching pursuit with the help of an overcomplete dictionary learned on a general purpose training dataset. We provide ample experimental results and performance comparisons to substantiate the usefulness of the proposed method. In the proposed technique the encoder is free from any decoder and it offers a significant saving in computation and yet yields a much higher compression quality.