Standard Image Compression for Data Link Transmission

The radar imaging community has expanded well beyond the traditional US militarycustomer base. The success of various DoD and NASA projects in mapping the earthand measuring various terrain features has increased overall interest in SAR imagery.Indeed, measurements such as ocean temperature and water flows, as well as polar icethickness measurements are essentially civilian applications of MASINT. Our approachcompresses the complex data that has already been subject to image formation. Thisprocessing could occur on airborne SAR platforms, or at space borne SAR groundstations. In either case vast amounts of complex imagery need to be compressedeither for dissemination or for archiving. If successful, the techniques developedin Phase I and implemented more fully in Phase II could be use to distributecompressed imagery to both civilian researchers and military users of SAR imagery.Reductions in storage and/or bandwidth for distributing SAR data could be expectedon the order of 10 to 50 compared to lossless compression algorithms.This technology could be successfully 'commercialized' if an off-the-shelf compressionsoftware suite were made available to entities distributing and/or using SAR imagery.The use of SAR systems and data is increasing steadily within both the civilian USGand the Department of Defense. Indeed MASINT techniques are also finding dual-usein applications such as detecting illegal hazardous waste dumps, tracking forestfires, and monitoring air/water purity. The technology benefit is extremelyleveraged since there is a limited number of SAR sensor systems (users ofcompression), but thousands of consumers of the product (users of decompression).The decompression stage could be made invisible to the user by embedding thedecompression software into standard image analysis tools. The ideal commercialapplication would be to standardize the compression algorithms as part of theNational Image Transmission Format (NITF), which would encourage widespreadinsertion of the technology into other commercial products.