Discrete atomic compression of satellite images: a comprehensive efficiency research

In this paper, a problem of resource expenses needed for storage, processing and transferring a large number of high resolution digital remote sensing images is considered. Application of discrete atomic compression (DAC), which is an algorithm based on atomic wavelets, to solving this problem is studied. Dependence of efficiency of the DAC algorithm on its parameters, in particular, quality loss settings, a structure of discrete atomic transform, which is a core of DAC, and a method of quantized wavelet coefficients’ encoding, is investigated. Binary arithmetic coding and a combination of Huffman codes with run-length encoding are used to provide lossless compression of quantized atomic wavelet coefficients. Comparison of these methods is presented. A set of digital images of the European Space Agency is employed as test data. In addition, we discuss promising ways to improve the DAC algorithm.