<title>Assessment of error propagation in ultraspectral sounder data via JPEG2000 compression and turbo coding</title>

Abstract

Research has been undertaken to examine the robustness of JPEG2000 when corrupted by transmission bit errors in a satellite data stream. Contemporary and future ultraspectral sounders such as Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), Geosynchronous Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS), and Hyperspectral Environmental Suite (HES) generate a large volume of three-dimensional data. Hence, compression of ultraspectral sounder data will facilitate data transmission and archiving. There is a need for lossless or near-lossless compression of ultraspectral sounder data to avoid potential retrieval degradation of geophysical parameters due to lossy compression. This paper investigates the simulated error propagation in AIRS ultraspectral sounder data with advanced source and channel coding in a satellite data stream. The source coding is done via JPEG2000, the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard for image compression. After JPEG2000 compression the AIRS ultraspectral sounder data is then error correction encoded using a rate 0.954 turbo product code (TPC) for channel error control. Experimental results of error patterns on both channel and source decoding are presented. The error propagation effects are curbed via the block-based protection mechanism in the JPEG2000 codec as well as memory characteristics of the forward error correction (FEC) scheme to contain decoding errors within received blocks. A single nonheader bit error in a source code block tends to contaminate the bits until the end of the source code block before the inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT), and those erroneous bits propagate even further after the IDWT. Furthermore, a single header bit error may result in the corruption of almost the entire decompressed granule. JPEG2000 appears vulnerable to bit errors in a noisy channel of satellite transmission, and thus has difficulty to preserve the quality of ultraspectral sounder data. A channel decoded bit error rate (BER) of 10-11 or better may be necessary for a granule error rate of 0.00116 in a compressed ultraspectral sounder data stream that is transmitted in a satellite channel. This work at The Aerospace Corporation and the University of Wisconsin, CIMSS, was under separate contracting from and performed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), a component of the U.S. Department of Commerce.