Low-Complexity Approaches for Lossless and Near-Lossless Hyperspectral Image Compression

There has recently been a strong interest towards low-complexity approaches for hyperspectral image compression, also driven by the standardization activities in this area and by the new hyperspectral missions that have been deployed. This chapter overviews the state-of-the-art of lossless and near-lossless compression of hyperspectral images, with a particular focus on approaches that comply with the requirements typical of real-world mission, in terms of low complexity and memory usage, error resilience and hardware friendliness. In particular, a very simple lossless compression algorithm is described, which is based on block-by-block prediction and adaptive Golomb coding, can exploit optimal band ordering, and can be extended to near-lossless compression. We also describe the results obtained with a hardware implementation of the algorithm. The compression performance of this algorithm is close to the state-of-the-art, and its low degree of complexity and memory usage, along with the possibility to compress data in parallel, make it a very good candidate for onboard hyperspectral image compression.