The effects of SAR data compression on coherent and non-coherent change detection

The performance of coherent and non-coherent change detection algorithms is evaluated using complex SAR data that have been processed with various data compression algorithms. When BAQ compression is applied to raw (I,Q) SAR phase-history data, our previous studies show that to obtain reasonably good coherent change detection (CCD) performance, BAQ compression requires 4-bit quantization of the I and Q phase-history samples; since the original data were 8-bits, the resulting compression ratio (CR) achieved using BAQ was a factor of 2. This paper demonstrates a wavelet-based compressive sensing approach that gives CR = 3 with comparable CCD performance; we also demonstrate a wavelet-based SPIHT approach that gives CR = 4 with comparable CCD performance.