Improving JPEG performance in conjunction with cloud editing for remote sensing applications

The authors propose an improved version of JPEG coding for compressing remote sensing images obtained by optical sensors onboard microsatellites. The approach involves expanding cloud features to include their cloud-land transitions, thereby simplifying their coding and subsequent compression. The system is fully automatic and appropriate for onboard implementation. Its improvement in coding stems from the realization that a large number of bits are used for coding the blocks that contain the transition regions between bright clouds, if present in the image, and the dark background. A fully automatic cloud-segmentation algorithm is therefore used to identify the external boundaries of the clouds, then smooth the corresponding blocks prior to coding. Further gains are also achieved by modifying the quantization table used for coding the coefficients of the discrete cosine transform. Compared to standard JPEG, at the same level of reconstruction quality, the new method can achieve compression ratio improvement by 13-161%, depending upon the context and the amount of cloud present in the specific image. The results are demonstrated with the help of several real images obtained by the University of Surrey, U.K., satellites.