A near-lossless compression method based on CCSDS for satellite images

Satellite images have been more and more popularly used in our daily life. For satellite image compression, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) had proposed an image compression standard (CCSDS-ICS) which is so far the most widely implemented in hardware. CCSDS-ICS provides good compression performance under the measure of PSNR. However, PSNR is a concept of average differences between the original image and the reconstructed one, which can not guarantee that the maximum difference of the two images would be less than an expected error. For using the information of satellite images more precisely without modifying the existing hardware system of CCSDS-ICS, a near-lossless strip-based satellite image compression algorithm is proposed. An adaptive pre-quantizer in order to reduce the entropy of an image is adopted and the quantized data is then fed into CCSDS-ICS as an input to be processed in the lossless compression mode. Experiment results show that by the proposed algorithm, not only can the good performance under the measure of PSNR be preserved, but also the differences are limited in the expected range to increase the reliability and the precision of the use of compressed satellite images.