Analysis of lossless radar images compression for navigation in marine traffic and remote transmission

One of the most important issue in maritime international transport is the necessity of increasing the level of safe in vesselpsilas navigation. We can achieve this goal using various methods. One of them is the enlargement and enrichment of navigational data processed by own deck computer net and external systems AIS (Automatic Identification System) and VTS (Vessel Traffic Service). The radar image contains extensive and useful navigational information. That is why the incorporation of it into remote transmission is proposed here. In order to successfully realize this process the enhancement of the NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association) code is proposed through incorporation of radar images into particular protocols. To decrease size of data under transmission a new algorithm, namely RLE-BER (Run Length Encoding with Binary Encoded Runs) for radar images compression is proposed. Some experimental results are presented on real data. The detail description of the method is also provided. The initial results are very promising, as the average compression ratio is near to 5:1 when considering monochrome palette (binary image). The proposed method is lossless, because we assumed the maximum safety level of the final system.