Weather Radar Data Compression Based on Zerotree Wavelet Algorithm

Wavelet based image compression is getting popular due to its promising compaction properties at low bit-rate. Zerotree wavelet image coding scheme efficiently exploits multi-level redundancy presented in transformed data to minimize coding bit. In this paper, a novel compression algorithm for weather radar data based on zerotree coding is presented. Considering the dependence of radar data, an efficient pre-processing algorithm of the data is given first and the redundancy of the data is efficiently reduced. Then an advanced embedded zerotree wavelet encoding algorithm is presented which uses context-based adaptive arithmetic coding to improve its performance. Experimental results show that for weather radar data, the proposed algorithm achieves good PSNR even in very low bit rate.