The effect of image compression on synthetic PROBA-V images
Alessandro Gimona, Laura Poggio, Inge Aalders, Matt J. Aitkenhead · International Journal of Remote Sensing · 2014
We have carried out an in-depth investigation into the effects of image compression on synthetic Probe for On-Board Autonomy – Vegetation (PROBA-V) scenes and Landsat-derived image tiles. The two image compression implementations used were the TER implementation and a bespoke implementation of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) Blue Book standard, which are functionally identical but operate on different image architectures. This work included (1) the development of an approach for producing synthetic scenes that were appropriate in terms of structure and content, and (2) evaluation of the image compression approach on the two kinds of image in terms of their usefulness for land-cover mapping. The synthetic image (SI) generation approach has been rigorously tested and produces images that are statistically similar to real scenes, both compressed and uncompressed. The results of our work show that the effects of image compression vary significantly between bands and with different compression ratios, and that the impact of image compression on image quality does vary with spatial scale. We also found indications of increased error rate at boundaries within the imagery. While the SI generation process and the processing chain of this imagery are not completely consistent with PROBA-V imagery, agreement was found among many of the results produced by the two approaches.