Evaluation of JPEG-LS, the new lossless and controlled-lossy still image compression standard, for compression of high-resolution elevation data

The compression of elevation data is studied. The performance of JPEG-LS, the new international ISO/ITU standard for lossless and near-lossless (controlled-lossy) still-image compression, is investigated both for data from the USGS digital elevation model (DEM) database and the navy-provided digital terrain model (DTM) data. Using JPEG-LS has the advantage of working with a standard algorithm. Moreover, in contrast with algorithms like the popular JPEG-lossy standard, this algorithm permits the completely lossless compression of the data as well as a controlled lossy mode where a sharp upper bound on the elevation error is selected by the user. All these are achieved at a very low computational complexity. In addition to these algorithmic advantages, they show that JPEG-LS achieves significantly better compression results than those obtained with other (nonstandard) algorithms previously investigated for the compression of elevation data. The results here reported suggest that JPEG-LS can immediately be adopted for the compression of elevation data for a number of applications.