A comparison of flat and object-based transform coding techniques for the compression of multispectral images

In this work we implement and compare several state-of-the-art transform coding schemes for the compression of multispectral images, in order to better understand which elements have a deeper impact on the overall performance, and which tools guarantee the best results. All schemes are based on Karhunen-Loeve transform and/or wavelet transform, in various combinations, and use SPIHT as the coding engine. Moreover, besides the ordinary techniques, their object-based counterparts are also examined, so as to study the viability of such approach [M. Cagnazzo et al., Oct 2004] for these images. Whenever possible, an optimal rate allocation strategy is applied. The experiments, performed on images acquired by two different sensors, highlight the superiority of KLT as spectral transform; the rough equivalence between object-based and ordinary techniques in terms of rate-distortion performance; and the importance of the optimal allocation.