Improvement of Bandelets in cost function and coding strategy for SAR image compression

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data collections can cover large areas at high resolution, generating massive amounts of data. Many existed transform-based compression techniques can effectively reduce the costs of storage and transmission with slight loss of information. As a new developed multi-resolution geometry analysis tool, Bandelet can make full use of intrinsic geometry regularity of images and exhibit enormous potential in image compression. In this paper, we propose a low complexity Bandelet transform for SAR image compression. A new cost function is defined to determine the optimal geometric flows in each dyadic squared sub-block of images, and an optimization of low frequency component followed by EBCOT coding of the Bandelet coefficients are employed. Some experiments are taken on some Ku-band SAR images came from Sandia National Laboratories and the results show the superiority of our proposed method over JPEG2000 and the second generation Bandelet in PSNR, ENL and EPI.