Image Content Dependent Compression of Polarimetric SAR Data

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technique for flexible SAR image compression in wavelet domain. Two approaches are considered: a) Compression leading to a scene independent, very homogenous signal-to-distortion noise ratio and constant phase error. In this case, reconstruction quality can be chosen (dependent from the required compression ratio) from good visible quality to nearly lossless reconstruction. b) Compression leading to high reconstruction quality for regions of interest and high compression ratio on background regions. Here,a higher compression ratio can be achieved to the expense of background quality.