Evaluation of compression schemes for wide area video

Current and upcoming wide-area aerial video collectors have very large effective focal plane arrays, and can generate a tremendous amount of data. This presents significant challenges for onboard storage and for real-time downlink. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of a number of different image and video compression schemes on wide-area video. In general, we found that video compression produces 3 to 5 times more compression than single image compression, at equivalent quality. The quality was measured using the Structural Similarity metric. We also found that the stream can be compressed by a factor of 100-200 without a perceptual loss in quality.