A remote sensing image compression method suited to space-borne application

With the development of space technology, the data of remote sensing image dramatically increase. In order to save storage space and channel bandwidth, remote sensing image must be compressed before transmitted from a spacecraft. However, the space conditions bring a lot of constraints on the image compression platform, such as much limited storage memory and the low complexity of the image compression algorithm. This paper presented an image compression method suited to the space-borne application. To solve the problem of large-size RS images taking up large cache, the compression scheme based on overlap blocks was taken. The overlap blocks of the image were multi-levelly decomposed by lifting wavelet. According to human visual characteristics, the lossless encoding method was used for the low-frequency sub-band most sensitive to human vision, and the bit-plane coding method was take for the remaining high-frequency sub-bands. Simulation results show that the algorithm can remove the blocking artifacts and realize the high quality image compression.