Adaptive SAR Image Compression in Wavelet Domain

Kurzfassung

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides valuable information for the remote sensing community. Polarimetry and interferometry are most important applications. They require amplitude and phase information of complex SAR data. Here, we propose a flexible phase preserving algorithm (FLECS) to compress these complex SAR data. Flexibility allows adjustment of compression ratio to the application's requirements. Adaptability of the algorithm ensures a signal-to-distortion-noise ratio and a phase error, which is nearly independent from image contents. The algorithm uses wavelet transform for energy packing and linear quantization for lossy compression in transform domain. In case of separately performed phase compression vector quantization is applied.