Assessing the impact of image compression on SAR automatic target detection and cuing
J.D. Gorman, Susan A. S. Werness, S.C. Wei · 2002
We present the results of a recent study on the impact of data compression on automatic target cuing (ATC) in magnitude-detected SAR imagery. Four "off-the-shelf" compression algorithms were tested: JPEG, an optimally-pruned tree-stuctured vector quantizer (PTSVQ), a wavelet coder with scalar quantization, and a hybrid wavelet/PTSVQ coder. At compression ratios of 2:1 and 1:1, all four compression algorithms yielded a similar image quality and we observed no statistically significant impacts on ATC performance. We also evaluated the impact of a noisy transmission channel on the overall system performance and found no measurable ATC performance loss at bit error rates of 10/sup -5/ when error mitigation techniques were used.