Feature preserving compression of high resolution SAR images

Compression techniques are required to transmit the large amounts of high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image data over the available channels. Common Image compression methods may lose detail and weak information in original images, especially at smoothness areas and edges with low contrast. This is known as "smoothing effect". It becomes difficult to extract and recognize some useful image features such as points and lines. We propose a new SAR image compression algorithm that can reduce the "smoothing effect" based on adaptive wavelet packet transform and feature-preserving rate allocation. For the reason that images should be modeled as non-stationary information resources, a SAR image is partitioned to overlapped blocks. Each overlapped block is then transformed by adaptive wavelet packet according to statistical features of different blocks. In quantifying and entropy coding of wavelet coefficients, we integrate feature-preserving technique. Experiments show that quality of our algorithm up to 16:1 compression ratio is improved significantly, and more weak information is reserved.