IMAGE DEQUANTIZATION FOR HYPERSPECTRAL LOSSY COMPRESSION WITH CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Diego Valsesia, Enrico Magli

Department of Electronics and Telecommunications – Politecnico di Torino, Italy

ABSTRACT

Significant work has been devoted to methods based on predictive coding for onboard compression of hyperspectral images. This is supported by the new CCSDS 123.0-B-2 recommendation for lossless and near-lossless compression.
While lossless compression can achieve high throughput, it can only achieve limited compression ratios. The introduction of a quantizer and local decoder in the prediction loop allows to implement lossy compression with good rate-performance.
However, the need to have a locally decoded version of a causal neighborhood of the current pixel under coding is a significant limiting factor in the throughput such encoder can achieve. In this work, we study the rate-distortion performance of a significantly simpler and faster onboard compressor based on prequantizing the pixels of the hyperspectral image and applying a lossless compressor (such as the lossless CCSDS CCSDS 123.0-B-2) to the quantized pixels. While this is suboptimal in terms of rate-distortion performance compared to having an in-loop quantizer, we compensate the lower quality with an on-ground post-processor based on modeling the distortion residual with a convolutional neural network. The task of the neural network is to learn the statistics of the quantization error and apply a dequantization model to restore the image.