Hyperspectral images lossless compression using the 3D binary EZW algorithm

This paper presents a transform based lossless compression for hyperspectral images which is inspired by Shapiro (1993)'s EZW algorithm. The proposed compression method uses a hybrid transform which includes an integer Karhunrn-Loeve transform (KLT) and integer discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The integer KLT is employed to eliminate the presence of correlations among the bands of the hyperspectral image. The integer 2D discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is applied to eliminate the correlations in the spatial dimensions and produce wavelet coefficients. These coefficients are then coded by a proposed binary EZW algorithm. The binary EZW eliminates the subordinate pass of conventional EZW by coding residual values, and produces binary sequences. The binary EZW algorithm combines the merits of well-known EZW and SPIHT algorithms, and it is computationally simpler for lossless compression. The proposed method was applied to AVIRIS images and compared to other state-of-the-art image compression techniques. The results show that the proposed lossless image compression is more efficient and it also has higher compression ratio than other algorithms.