A resilient and quick data compression method of prediction errors for space missions
J. Portell, Alberto González Villafranca, Enrique García-Berro · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
It has passed more than a decade since the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) made its recommendation for lossless data compression. The CCSDS standard is commonly used for scientific missions because it is a general-purpose lossless compression technique with a low computational cost which results in acceptable compression ratios. At the core of this compression algorithm it is the Rice coding method. Its performance rapidly degrades in the presence of noise and outliers, as the Rice coder is conceived for noiseless data following geometric distributions. To overcome this problem we present here a new coder, the so-called Prediction Error Coder (PEC), as well as its fully adaptive version (FAPEC) which we show is a reliable alternative to the CCSDS standard. We show that PEC and FAPEC achieve large compression ratios even when high levels of noise are present in the data. This is done testing our compressors with synthetic and real data, and comparing the compression ratios and processor requirements with those obtained using the CCSDS standard.