State-of-the-art lossy compression of Martian images via the CMA-ES evolution strategy

The research described in this paper uses the CMA-ES evolution strategy to optimize matched forward and inverse transform pairs for the compression and reconstruction of images transmitted from Mars rovers under conditions subject to quantization error. Our best transforms outperform the 2/6 wavelet (whose integer variant was used onboard the rovers), substantially reducing error in reconstructed images without allowing increases in compressed file size. This result establishes a new state-of-the-art for the lossy compression of images transmitted over the deep-space channel.