Compression of multispectral remote sensing images using clustering and spectral reduction

Image compression has been one of the main research topics in the field of image processing for a long time. The research usually focuses on compressing images that are visible to humans. The images being compressed are usually gray-level images or RGB color images. Recent advances in technology, however, enable the authors to make the detailed processing of spectral features in the images. Therefore, the compression of images with many spectral channels, called multispectral images, is required. Many methods used in traditional lossy image compression can be reused also in the compression of multispectral images. In this paper, a new combination of clustering spectra, manipulating spectral vectors, and encoding and decoding for multispectral images is presented. In the manipulation of the spectral vectors PCA, ICA, and wavelets are used. The approach is based on extracting relevant spectral information. Furthermore, some quantitative quality measures for multispectral images are presented.