Image content dependent compression of polarimetric SAR data

This paper presents a novel technique for flexible SAR image compression in wavelet domain. Two approaches are considered: a) Compression leading to a scene independent, very homogenous signal-to-distortion noise ratio and constant phase error. Reconstruction quality varies-dependent from the required compression ratio-from good visible quality to nearly lossless reconstruction. b) Compression leading to high reconstruction quality for regions of interest and high compression ratio on background regions.