A feasibility study of on-board data compression for infrared cameras of space observatories

In this paper, the feasibility of on-board data reduction/compression concept described in is evaluated for infrared images taken from space observatories. The method described in, which was initially designed and developed for the PACS (photodetector array camera and spectrometer) instrument, makes use of on-board integration to achieve higher compression ratio (CR) for applications with a modest telemetry rate. The evaluation of the reduction concept takes into account the visual performance (distortion) and the compression ratio. The distortion is assessed by calculating the reconstruction error using 4 metrics, namely, root mean square error (RMSE), signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) and potential information loss (PIL). A quantitative evaluation of the on-board compression concept is performed on data from the infrared camera ISOCAM (infrared space observatory camera). We conclude with a short summary.