Synthetic aperture radar image compression using tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform

Currently, wavelet-based coding algorithms are popular for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image compression, which is very important for reducing the cost of data storage and transmission in relatively slow channels. However, standard wavelet transform is limited by spatial isotropy of its basis functions that is not completely adapted to represent image entities like edges or textures, which means wavelet-based coding algorithms are suboptimal to image compression. In this paper, a novel tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform is proposed for SAR image compression. Inspired by the intrinsic geometric structure of images, the new transform improves the performance of standard wavelet by filtering along the regular direction first and then along the orthogonal direction with directional lifting structure. The cost function of best basis selection is designed by textural and directional information for tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform. The new transform including speckle reduction can be used to construct SAR image coder with the embedded block coding with optimal truncation for transform coefficients, and arithmetic coding for additional information. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms JPEG2000 and Fast wavelet packet (FWP), both visually and item of PSNR values.