Experiments with wavelets for compression of SAR data

Wavelet transform coding is shown to be an effective method for compression of both detected and complex synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Three different orthogonal wavelet transform filters are examined for use in SAR data compression; the performances of the filters are correlated with mathematical properties such as regularity and number of vanishing moments. Excellent quality reconstructions are obtained at data rates as low as 0.25 bpp for detected data and as low as 0.5 bits per element (or 2 bpp) for complex data.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>