Lossy Compression of Multichannel Remote Sensing Images with Quality Control

Lossy compression is widely used to decrease the size of multichannel remote sensing data. Alongside this positive effect, lossy compression may lead to a negative outcome as making worse image classification. Thus, if possible, lossy compression should be carried out carefully, controlling the qual...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vladimir Lukin, Irina Vasilyeva, Sergey Krivenko, Fangfang Li, Sergey Abramov, Oleksii Rubel, Benoit Vozel, Kacem Chehdi, Karen Egiazarian
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-11-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/22/3840
Description
Summary:Lossy compression is widely used to decrease the size of multichannel remote sensing data. Alongside this positive effect, lossy compression may lead to a negative outcome as making worse image classification. Thus, if possible, lossy compression should be carried out carefully, controlling the quality of compressed images. In this paper, a dependence between classification accuracy of maximum likelihood and neural network classifiers applied to three-channel test and real-life images and quality of compressed images characterized by standard and visual quality metrics is studied. The following is demonstrated. First, a classification accuracy starts to decrease faster when image quality due to compression ratio increasing reaches a distortion visibility threshold. Second, the classes with a wider distribution of features start to “take pixels” from classes with narrower distributions of features. Third, a classification accuracy might depend essentially on the training methodology, i.e., whether features are determined from original data or compressed images. Finally, the drawbacks of pixel-wise classification are shown and some recommendations on how to improve classification accuracy are given.
ISSN:2072-4292