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Regression wavelet analysis (RWA) is one of the current state-of-the-art lossless compression techniques for remote sensing data. This article presents the first regression-based near-lossless compression method. It is built upon RWA, a quantizer, and a feedback loop to compensate the quantization error. Our near-lossless RWA (NLRWA) proposal can be followed by any entropy coding technique. Here, the NLRWA is coupled with a bitplane-based coder that supports progressive decoding. This successfully enables gradual quality refinement and lossless and near-lossless recovery. A smart strategy for selecting the NLRWA quantization steps is also included. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art lossless and the near-lossless compression methods in terms of compression ratios and quality retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of whole-slide images (WSIs) in pathology entails stringent storage and transmission requirements because of their huge dimensions. Therefore, image compression is an essential tool to enable efficient access to these data. In particular, color transforms are needed to exploit the very high degree of inter-component correlation and obtain competitive compression performance. Even though the state-of-the-art color transforms remove some redundancy, they disregard important details of the compression algorithm applied after the transform. Therefore, their coding performance is not optimal. We propose an optimization method called mosaic optimization for designing irreversible and reversible color transforms simultaneously optimized for any given WSI and the subsequent compression algorithm. Mosaic optimization is designed to attain reasonable computational complexity and enable continuous scanner operation. Exhaustive experimental results indicate that, for JPEG 2000 at identical compression ratios, the optimized transforms yield images more similar to the original than the other state-of-the-art transforms. Specifically, irreversible optimized transforms outperform the Karhunen–Loève Transform in terms of PSNR (up to 1.1 dB), the HDR-VDP-2 visual distortion metric (up to 3.8 dB), and the accuracy of computer-aided nuclei detection tasks (F1 score up to 0.04 higher). In addition, reversible optimized transforms achieve PSNR, HDR-VDP-2, and nuclei detection accuracy gains of up to 0.9 dB, 7.1 dB, and 0.025, respectively, when compared with the reversible color transform in lossy-to-lossless compression regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional strategy to download images captured by satellites is to compress the data on board and then transmit them via the downlink. It often happens that the capacity of the downlink is too small to accommodate all the acquired data, so the images are trimmed and/or transmitted through lossy regimes. This paper introduces a coding system that increases the amount and quality of the downloaded imaging data. The main insight of this paper is to use both the uplink and the downlink to code the images. The uplink is employed to send reference information to the satellite so that the onboard coding system can achieve higher efficiency. This reference information is computed on the ground, possibly employing extensive data and computational resources. The proposed system is called dual link image coding. As it is devised in this paper, it is suitable for Earth observation satellites with polar orbits. Experimental results obtained for data sets acquired by the Landsat 8 satellite indicate significant coding gains with respect to conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital cameras have become ubiquitous for amateur and professional applications. The raw images captured by digital sensors typically take the form of color filter array (CFA) mosaic images which must be “developed” (via digital signal processing) before they can be viewed. Photographers and scientists often repeat the “development process” using different parameters to obtain images suitable for different purposes. Since the development process is generally not invertible it is commonly desirable to store the raw (or undeveloped) mosaic images indefinitely. Uncompressed mosaic image file sizes can be more than 30 times larger than those of developed images stored in JPEG format. Thus data compression is of interest. Several compression methods for mosaic images have been proposed in the literature. However they all require a custom decompressor followed by development-specific software to generate a displayable image. In this paper a novel compression pipeline that removes these requirements is proposed. Specifically mosaic images can be losslessly recovered from the resulting compressed files and more significantly images can be directly viewed (decompressed and developed) using only a JPEG 2000 compliant image viewer. Experiments reveal that the proposed pipeline attains excellent visual quality while providing compression performance competitive to that of state-of-the-art compression algorithms for mosaic images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the increasing utilization of medical imaging in clinical practice and the growing dimensions of data volumes generated by various medical imaging modalities, the distribution, storage, and management of digital medical image data sets requires data compression. Over the past few decades, several image compression standards have been proposed by international standardization organizations. This paper discusses the current status of these image compression standards in medical imaging applications together with some of the legal and regulatory issues surrounding the use of compression in medical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) has issued several data compression standards devised to reduce the amount of data transmitted from satellites to ground stations. This paper introduces a contextual arithmetic encoder for on-board data compression. The proposed arithmetic encoder checks the causal adjacent neighbors, at most, to form the context and uses only bitwise operations to estimate the related probabilities. As a result, the encoder consumes few computational resources, making it suitable for on-board operation. Our coding approach is based on the prediction and mapping stages of CCSDS-123 lossless compression standard, an optional quantizer stage to yield lossless or near-lossless compression and our proposed arithmetic encoder. For both lossless and near-lossless compression, the achieved coding performance is superior to that of CCSDS-123, M-CALIC, and JPEG-LS. Taking into account only the entropy encoders, fixed-length codeword is slightly better than MQ and interleaved entropy coding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In spread spectrum (SS) communications, the input signal is spread over a wider bandwidth to avoid interference or interception. One of the most common SS techniques is direct sequence SS (DSSS). In this Letter, the authors propose non‐cooperative compressive detection techniques for DSSS signals. The proposed compressive detection framework allows the use of random as well as designed measurement kernels. A technique for designing compressive measurement kernels which exploit DSSS signal structure and non‐uniform usage of spreading codes is proposed. Theoretical and simulation results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed methods with their conventional counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel wavelet-based scheme to increase coefficient independence in hyperspectral images is introduced for lossless coding. The proposed regression wavelet analysis (RWA) uses multivariate regression to exploit the relationships among wavelet-transformed components. It builds on our previous nonlinear schemes that estimate each coefficient from neighbor coefficients. Specifically, RWA performs a pyramidal estimation in the wavelet domain, thus reducing the statistical relations in the residuals and the energy of the representation compared to existing wavelet-based schemes. We propose three regression models to address the issues concerning estimation accuracy, component scalability, and computational complexity. Other suitable regression models could be devised for other goals. RWA is invertible, it allows a reversible integer implementation, and it does not expand the dynamic range. Experimental results over a wide range of sensors, such as AVIRIS, Hyperion, and Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer, suggest that RWA outperforms not only principal component analysis and wavelets but also the best and most recent coding standard in remote sensing, CCSDS-123. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis techniques applied to DNA microarray images are under active development. As new techniques become available, it will be useful to apply them to existing microarray images to obtain more accurate results. The compression of these images can be a useful tool to alleviate the costs associated to their storage and transmission. The recently proposed Relative Quantizer (RQ) coder provides the most competitive lossy compression ratios while introducing only acceptable changes in the images. However, images compressed with the RQ coder can only be reconstructed with a limited quality, determined before compression. In this work, a progressive lossy-to-lossless scheme is presented to solve this problem. First, the regular structure of the RQ intervals is exploited to define a lossy-to-lossless coding algorithm called the Progressive RQ (PRQ) coder. Second, an enhanced version that prioritizes a region of interest, called the PRQ-region of interest (ROI) coder, is described. Experiments indicate that the PRQ coder offers progressivity with lossless and lossy coding performance almost identical to the best techniques in the literature, none of which is progressive. In turn, the PRQ-ROI exhibits very similar lossless coding results with better rate-distortion performance than both the RQ and PRQ coders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DNA microarrays are one of the fastest-growing new technologies in the field of genetic research, and DNA microarray images continue to grow in number and size. Since analysis techniques are under active and ongoing development, storage, transmission and sharing of DNA microarray images need be addressed, with compression playing a significant role. However, existing lossless coding algorithms yield only limited compression performance (compression ratios below 2:1), whereas lossy coding methods may introduce unacceptable distortions in the analysis process. This work introduces a novel Relative Quantizer (RQ), which employs non-uniform quantization intervals designed for improved compression while bounding the impact on the DNA microarray analysis. This quantizer constrains the maximum relative error introduced into quantized imagery, devoting higher precision to pixels critical to the analysis process. For suitable parameter choices, the resulting variations in the DNA microarray analysis are less than half of those inherent to the experimental variability. Experimental results reveal that appropriate analysis can still be performed for average compression ratios exceeding 4.5:1. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a sequence detector designed to retrieve data bits from compressively sampled frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) Gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) signals. The received signal waveform is not reconstructed from the compressive measurements, nor are received bits detected on a symbol-by-symbol basis. Rather, the entire sequence of transmitted symbols is detected from the entire sequence of compressive measurements. Another novel aspect of the work is that a non-cooperative scenario is assumed. Specifically, the receiver is assumed to have no prior knowledge of the specific spread spectrum hopping sequence used by the transmitter. The most significant contribution of the work is the design of adaptive sampling kernels that exploit the structure of an FHSS-GFSK signal to obtain significant performance improvements over random-kernel sampling. The resulting system can automatically choose an appropriate compression ratio as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) without explicit knowledge of the SNR. Additionally, the noise folding problem present in random-kernel sampling is greatly alleviated by use of the adaptive sampling kernels. Compared with Nyquist sampling, adaptive compressive sampling offers compression ratios ranging from 20 to 32, depending on the SNR while suffering less than 1 dB loss in the resulting bit error rate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spectral transforms are tools commonly employed in multi- and hyperspectral data compression to decorrelate images in the spectral domain. The pairwise orthogonal transform (POT) is one such transform that has been specifically devised for resource- constrained contexts similar to those found on board satellites or airborne sensors. Combining the POT with a 2-D coder yields an efficient compressor for multi- and hyperspectral data. However, a drawback of the original POT is that its dynamic range expansion, i.e., the increase in bit depth of transformed images, is not constant, which may cause problems with hardware implementations. Additionally, the dynamic range expansion is often too large to be compatible with the current 2-D standard CCSDS 122.0-B-1. This paper introduces the isorange POT, a derived transform that has a small and limited dynamic range expansion, compatible with CCSDS 122.0-B-1 in almost all scenarios. Experimental results suggest that the proposed transform achieves lossy coding performance close to that of the original transform. For lossless coding, the original POT and the proposed isorange POT achieve virtually the same performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A methodology for visually lossless compression of monochrome stereoscopic 3D images is proposed. Visibility thresholds are measured for quantization distortion in JPEG2000. These thresholds are found to be functions of not only spatial frequency, but also of wavelet coefficient variance, as well as the gray level in both the left and right images. To avoid a daunting number of measurements during subjective experiments, a model for visibility thresholds is developed. The left image and right image of a stereo pair are then compressed jointly using the visibility thresholds obtained from the proposed model to ensure that quantization errors in each image are imperceptible to both eyes. This methodology is then demonstrated via a particular 3D stereoscopic display system with an associated viewing condition. The resulting images are visually lossless when displayed individually as 2D images, and also when displayed in stereoscopic 3D mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parallel processing is key to augmenting the throughput of image codecs. Despite numerous efforts to parallelize wavelet-based image coding systems, most attempts fail at the parallelization of the bitplane coding engine, which is the most computationally intensive stage of the coding pipeline. The main reason for this failure is the causality with which current coding strategies are devised, which assumes that one coefficient is coded after another. This work analyzes the mechanisms employed in bitplane coding and proposes alternatives to enhance opportunities for parallelism. We describe a stationary probability model that, without sacrificing the advantages of current approaches, removes the main obstacle to the parallelization of most coding strategies. Experimental tests evaluate the coding performance achieved by the proposed method in the framework of JPEG2000 when coding different types of images. Results indicate that the stationary probability model achieves similar coding performance, with slight increments or decrements depending on the image type and the desired level of parallelism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visually lossless coding allows image codecs to achieve high compression ratios while producing images without visually noticeable distortion. In general, visually lossless coding is approached from the point of view of the encoder, so most methods are not applicable to already compressed codestreams. This paper presents two algorithms focused on the visually lossless decoding and transmission of JPEG2000 codestreams. The proposed strategies can be employed by a decoder, or a JPIP server, to reduce the decoding or transmission rate without penalizing the visual quality of the resulting images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computed tomography (CT) is a noninvasive medical test obtained via a series of X-ray exposures resulting in 3-D images that aid medical diagnosis. Previous approaches for coding such 3-D images propose to employ multicomponent transforms to exploit correlation among CT slices, but these approaches do not always improve coding performance with respect to a simpler slice-by-slice coding approach. In this paper, we propose a novel analysis which accurately predicts when the use of a multicomponent transform is profitable. This analysis models the correlation coefficient r based on image acquisition parameters readily available at acquisition time. Extensive experimental results from multiple image sensors suggest that multicomponent transforms are appropriate for images with correlation coefficient r in excess of 0.87. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to exponential growth in image sizes, visually lossless coding is increasingly being considered as an alternative to numerically lossless coding, which has limited compression ratios. This paper presents a method of encoding color images in a visually lossless manner using JPEG2000. In order to hide coding artifacts caused by quantization, visibility thresholds (VTs) are measured and used for quantization of subband signals in JPEG2000. The VTs are experimentally determined from statistically modeled quantization distortion, which is based on the distribution of wavelet coefficients and the dead-zone quantizer of JPEG2000. The resulting VTs are adjusted for locally changing backgrounds through a visual masking model, and then used to determine the minimum number of coding passes to be included in the final codestream for visually lossless quality under the desired viewing conditions. Codestreams produced by this scheme are fully JPEG2000 Part-I compliant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work introduces a rate allocation method for the transmission of pre-encoded JPEG2000 video over time-varying channels, which vary their capacity during video transmission due to network congestion, hardware failures, or router saturation. Such variations occur often in networks and are commonly unpredictable in practice. The optimization problem is posed for such networks and a rate allocation method is formulated to handle such variations. The main insight of the proposed method is to extend the complexity scalability features of the FAst rate allocation through STeepest descent (FAST) algorithm. Extensive experimental results suggest that the proposed transmission scheme achieves near-optimal performance while expending few computational resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]