Simple resiliency improvement of the CCSDS standard for lossless data compression
Marcial Clotet, J. Portell, Alberto González Villafranca, Enrique García-Berro · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
ABSTRACT The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) recommends the use of a two-stage strategyfor lossless data compression in space. At the core of the second stage is the Rice coding method. The Ricecompression ratio rapidly decreases in the presence of noise and outliers, since this coder is specially conceived fornoiseless data following geometric distributions. This, in turn, makes the CCSDS recommendation too sensitivein front of outliers in the data, leading to non-optimal ratios in realistic scenarios. In this paper we proposeto substitute the Rice coder of the CCSDS recommendation by a subexponential coder. We show that thissolution oers high compression ratios even when large amounts of noise are present in the data. This is doneby testing both compressors with synthetic and real data. The performance is actually similar to that obtainedwith the FAPEC coder, although with slightly higher processing requirements. Therefore, this solution appearsas a simple improvement that can be done to the current CCSDS standard with an excellent return.Keywords: Data compression, lossless, CCSDS, resilient, robust, Rice, subexponential