High-Performance lossless compression of hyperspectral remote sensing scenes based on spectral decorrelation

The capacity of the downlink channel is a major bottleneck for applications based on remote sensing hyperspectral imagery (HSI). Data compression is an essential tool to maximize the amount of HSI scenes that can be retrieved on the ground. At the same time, energy and hardware constraints of spaceborne devices impose limitations on the complexity of practical compression algorithms. To avoid any distortion in the analysis of the HSI data, only lossless compression is considered in this study. This work aims at finding the most advantageous compression-complexity trade-off within the state of the art in HSI compression. To do so, a novel comparison of the most competitive spectral decorrelation approaches combined with the best performing low-complexity compressors of the state is presented. Compression performance and execution time results are obtained for a set of 47 HSI scenes produced by 14 different sensors in real remote sensing missions. Assuming only a limited amount of energy is available, obtained data suggest that the FAPEC algorithm yields the best trade-off. When compared to the CCSDS 123.0-B-2 standard, FAPEC is 5.0 times faster and its compressed data rates are on average within 16% of the CCSDS standard. In scenarios where energy constraints can be relaxed, CCSDS 123.0-B-2 yields the best average compression results of all evaluated methods.