Effect of d-Dimensional Re-orderings on Lossless Compression of Radio-Astronomy and Digital Elevation Data

For multidimensional data, Space-Filling Curves (SFCs) have been used to improve the execution time of spatial data queries. However, their effect on compression, when used to reorder the uncompressed values, is known to a lesser extent. We investigate the impact of three SFCs on Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) elevation data and Square-Kilometre Array telescope (SKA) radio-astronomy data: two types of datasets to which SFCs have not been extensively applied, within a compression context. This work contributes to the understanding of how such reorderings impact compression performance and affect different compression schemes and preprocessing techniques through their use. We show empirical results from combining eight common compression schemes, the Z-Order, Gray-Code, and Hilbert space-filling curves, and the bitwise preprocessing technique BitShuffle. The Hilbert Curve consistently outperforms the other orderings for the SRTM dataset though the mapping implementation incurs a significant speed penalty. However, the Z-Order and Gray-Code Curves are best for the SKA dataset. Through an analysis of the dataset autocorrelations, file-entropies, and block-entropies; we show that the SKA dataset’s dimensional bias is not exploited as much by the Hilbert Curve compared to the Z-Order and Gray-Code Curves. However, the Hilbert Curve is the most appropriate for the SRTM dataset as it can be modelled as isotropic and has a significantly higher level of local autocorrelation. BitShuffle is necessary to practically compress the SKA data, but does contribute to the compression performance of the SRTM dataset. These curves and BitShuffle are advantageous in reducing block-entropy values for such datasets.