Low-complexity compression of multispectral images based on classified transform coding

Compression of remote-sensing images can be necessary in various stages of the image life, and especially on-board a satellite before transmission to the ground station. Although on-board CPU power is quite limited, it is now possible to implement sophisticated real-time compression techniques, provided that complexity constraints are taken into account at design time. In this paper we consider the class-based multispectral image coder originally proposed in [Gelli and Poggi, Compression of multispectral images by spectral classification and transform coding, IEEE Trans. Image Process. (April 1999) 476–489 [5]] and modify it to allow its use in real time with limited hardware resources. Experiments carried out on several multispectral images show that the resulting unsupervised coder has a fully acceptable complexity, and a rate–distortion performance which is superior to that of the original supervised coder, and comparable to that of the best coders known in the literature.