Ultraspectral sounder data compression using a novel marker-based error-resilient arithmetic coder
Bormin Huang, Y. Sriraja, Shih-Chieh Wei · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Entropy coding techniques aim to achieve the entropy of the source data by assigning variable-length codewords to symbols with the code lengths linked to the corresponding symbol probabilities. Entropy coders (e.g. Huffman coding, arithmetic coding), in one form or the other, are commonly used as the last stage in various compression schemes. While these variable-length coders provide better compression than fixed-length coders, they are vulnerable to transmission errors. Even a single bit error in the transmission process can cause havoc in the subsequent decoded stream. To cope with it, this research proposes a marker-based sentinel mechanism in entropy coding for error detection and recovery. We use arithmetic coding as an example to demonstrate this error-resilient technique for entropy coding. Experimental results on ultraspectral sounder data indicate that the marker-based error-resilient arithmetic coder provides remarkable robustness to correct transmission errors without significantly compromising the compression gains.