Synthetic aperture radar raw data compression using wavelet packet transform and trellis coded quantization

Performing some form of compression on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is necessary and important to curtail the downlink capacity and on-board storage requirements of a SAR system. In this paper, we present a transform coding approach for compression of SAR raw data using wavelet packet transform. Trellis coded quantization (TCQ) techniques are used to quantize the transform coefficients. A variation of TCQ implementation using a significance test is investigated. Simulation results on real SAR raw data show the improved performance of the proposed algorithm over standard block adaptive quantization (BAQ) technique.