Compression of multispectral images by spectral classification and transform coding

This paper presents a new technique for the compression of multispectral images, which relies on the segmentation of the image into regions of approximately homogeneous land cover. The rationale behind this approach is that, within regions of the same land cover, the pixels have stationary statistics and are characterized by mostly linear dependency, contrary to what usually happens for unsegmented images. Therefore, by applying conventional transform coding techniques to homogeneous groups of pixels, the proposed algorithm is able to effectively exploit the statistical redundancy of the image, thereby improving the rate distortion performance. The proposed coding strategy consists of three main steps. First, each pixel is classified by vector quantizing its spectral response vector, so that both a reliable classification and a minimum distortion encoding of each vector are obtained. Then, the classification map is entropy encoded and sent as side information. Finally, the residual vectors are grouped according to their classes and undergo Karhunen–Loeve transform in the spectral domain and discrete cosine transform in the spatial domain. Numerical experiments on a six-band thematic mapper image show that the proposed technique outperforms the conventional transform coding technique by 1 to 2 dB at all rates of interest.