Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data Compression Using JPEG-2000

The size of remotely sensed data is constantly growing, which causes problems related to data transfer and archiving. The most common solution of this problem is data compression. This work investigates the feasibility of sensor-level TLS data compression using JPEG-2000 lossless and lossy schemes. TLS data are treated as a multi-band image or a set of images consisting of range, intensity, and optionally RGB bands. The investigation focuses on performance assessment in terms of storage space saving, data distortion due to lossy compression, and compression and decompression speed. Experiments executed on real TLS data show that the proposed JPEG-2000 strategy for both lossy and lossless schemes allows to save more storage space than other compression methods. The lossy scheme resulted in the strongest compression and only had insignificant impact on data distortion. Finally, JPEG-2000 compression was identified as the fastest method. It is even suitable for real-time compression at sensor-level.