Impact of CCSDS-IDC and JPEG 2000 Compression on Image Quality and Classification

Abstract

This study measures the impact of both on-board and user-side lossy image compression (CCSDS-IDC and JPEG 2000) on image quality and classification. The Sentinel-2 Image Performance Simulator was modified to include these compression algorithms in order to produce Sentinel-2 simulated images with on-board lossy compression. A multitemporal set of Landsat images was used for the user-side compression scenario in order to study a crop area. The performance of several compressors was evaluated by computing the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the compressed images. The overall accuracy of land-cover classifications of these images was also evaluated. The results show that on-board CCSDS performs better than JPEG 2000 in terms of compression fidelity, especially at lower compression ratios (from CR 2:1 up to CR 4:1, i.e., 8 to 4 bpppb). The effect of compression on land cover classification follows the same trends, but compression fidelity may not be enough to assess the impact of compression on end-user applications. If compression is applied by end-users, the results show that 3D-JPEG 2000 obtains higher compression fidelity than CCSDS and JPEG 2000 with other parameterizations. This is due to the high dynamic range of the images (representing reflectances*10000), which JPEG 2000 is able to exploit better.