Data compression techniques as a means of reducing the storage requirements for satellite data: a quantitative comparison

This paper reports on an investigation into the application of data compression techniques as a means of reducing the `on-ground¿ data storage requirements that are associated with many space research programmes. The paper presents and compares quantitatively various compression techniques based on the Shannon-Fano, `run-length¿ and Hadamard transformation methods of source encoding. The compression ratios obtained when applying the techniques to actual satellite data are given and some new basic theory relating to `run-length¿ encoding is presented.