Practical transform coding of multispectral imagery

We present an implementable three dimensional terrain adaptive transform based bandwidth compression technique for multispectral imagery. The algorithm exploits the inherent spectral and spatial correlations in the data. The compression technique is based on Karhunen-Loeve transformation for spectral decorrelation followed by the standard JPEG algorithm for coding the resulting spectrally decorrelated eigen images. The algorithm is conveniently parameterized to accommodate reconstructed image fidelities ranging from near-lossless at about 5:1 CR to visually lossy beginning at about 30:1 CR. The novelty of this technique lies in its unique capability to adaptively vary the characteristics of the spectral correlation transformation as a function of the variation of the local terrain. The spectral and spatial modularity of the algorithm architecture allows the JPEG to be replaced by a alternate spatial coding procedure. The significant practical advantage of this proposed approach is that it is based on the standard and highly developed JPEG compression technology