BPG-Based Lossy Compression of Three-Channel Noisy Images with Prediction of Optimal Operation Existence and Its Parameters

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a clear trend toward increasing the number of remote-sensing images acquired and their average size. This leads to the need to compress the images for storage, dissemination, and transfer over communication lines where lossy compression techniques are more popular. The images to be compressed or some of their components are often noisy. They must therefore be compressed taking into account the properties of the noise. Due to the noise filtering effect obtained during lossy compression of noisy images, an optimal operating point (OOP) may exist. The OOP is a parameter that controls the compression for which the quality of the compressed image is closer (closest) to the corresponding noise-free image than the quality of the noisy (original, uncompressed) image according to some quantitative criterion (metric). In practice, it is important to know whether the OOP exists for a given image, because if the OOP exists, it is appropriate to perform the compression in the OOP or at least in its neighborhood. Since the real image is absent in practice, it is impossible to determine a priori whether the OOP exists or not. Here, we focus on three-channel-remote-sensing images and show that it is possible to easily predict the existence of the OOP. Furthermore, it is possible to predict the metric values or their improvements with appropriate accuracy for practical use. The BPG (better portable graphics) encoder is considered a special case of an efficient compression technique. As an initial design step, the case of additive white Gaussian noise with equal variance in the three components is considered. While previous research was mainly focused on predicting the improvement (reduction) of the PSNR and PSNR-HVS-M metrics, here we focus on the modern visual quality metrics, namely PSNR-HA and MDSI. We also discuss what to do if, according to the prediction, an OOP is absent. Examples of lossy compression of noisy three-channel remote sensing images are given. It is also shown that the use of three-dimensional compression provides a compression ratio increase by several times compared with component-wise compression in the OOP.