<title>Ultraspectral sounder data compression using error-detecting reversible variable-length coding</title>

Abstract

Nonreversible variable-length codes (e.g. Huffman coding, Golomb-Rice coding, and arithmetic coding) have been used in source coding to achieve efficient compression. However, a single bit error during noisy transmission can cause many codewords to be misinterpreted by the decoder. In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the design of reversible variable-length codes (RVLCs) for better data transmission in error-prone environments. RVLCs allow instantaneous decoding in both directions, which affords better detection of bit errors due to synchronization losses over a noisy channel. RVLCs have been adopted in emerging video coding standards--H.263+ and MPEG-4--to enhance their error-resilience capabilities. Given the large volume of three-dimensional data that will be generated by future space-borne ultraspectral sounders (e.g. IASI, CrIS, and HES), the use of error-robust data compression techniques will be beneficial to satellite data transmission. In this paper, we investigate a reversible variable-length code for ultraspectral sounder data compression, and present its numerical experiments on error propagation for the ultraspectral sounder data. The results show that the RVLC performs significantly better error containment than JPEG2000 Part 2.