Lossless compression of multispectral images using spectral information

Abstract

Multispectral images are available for different purposes due to developments in spectral imaging systems. The sizes of multispectral images are enormous. Thus transmission and storage of these volumes of data require huge time and memory resources. That is why compression algorithms must be developed. A salient property of multispectral images is that strong spectral correlation exists throughout almost all bands. This fact is successfully used to predict each band based on the previous bands. We propose to use spectral linear prediction and entropy coding with context modeling for encoding multispectral images. Linear prediction predicts the value for the next sample and computes the difference between predicted value and the original value. This difference is usually small, so it can be encoded with less its than the original value. The technique implies prediction of each image band by involving number of bands along the image spectra. Each pixel is predicted using information provided by pixels in the previous bands in the same spatial position. As done in the JPEG-LS, the proposed coder also represents the mapped residuals by using an adaptive Golomb-Rice code with context modeling. This residual coding is context adaptive, where the context used for the current sample is identified by a context quantization function of the three gradients. Then, context-dependent Golomb-Rice code and bias parameters are estimated sample by sample. The proposed scheme was compared with three algorithms applied to the lossless compression of multispectral images, namely JPEG-LS, Rice coding, and JPEG2000. Simulation tests performed on AVIRIS images have demonstrated that the proposed compression scheme is suitable for multispectral images.