IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 6, NO. 3, JULY 2009 587
Lossy-to-Lossless Hyperspectral Image
Compression Based on Multiplierless
Reversible Integer TDLT/KLT
Lei Wang, Jiaji Wu, Member, IEEE, Licheng Jiao, Senior Member, IEEE, and Guangming Shi, Member, IEEE
Abstract—We proposed a new transform scheme of multipli-
erless reversible time-domain lapped transform and Karhunen–
Loève transform (RTDLT/KLT) for lossy-to-lossless hyperspectral
image compression. Instead of applying discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) in the spatial domain, RTDLT is applied for decorrelation.
RTDLT can be achieved by existing discrete cosine transform and
pre- and postfilters, while the reversible transform is guaranteed
by a matrix factorization method. In the spectral direction, re-
versible integer low-complexity KLT is used for decorrelation.
Owing to completely reversible transform, the proposed method
can realize progressive lossy-to-lossless compression from a single
embedded code-stream file. Numerical experiments on benchmark
images show that the proposed transform scheme performs better
than 5/3DWT-based methods in both lossy and lossless compres-
sions, comparable with the optimal 9/7DWT-FloatKLT-based lossy
compression method.
Index Terms—Discrete cosine transform (DCT), hyperspectral
image compression, integer transform, Karhunen–Loève trans-
form (KLT), lossy-to-lossless compression, time-domain lapped
transform (TDLT).
I. I NTRODUCTION
H
YPERSPECTRAL images have wide applications nowa-
days such as in atmospheric detecting, remote sensing,
military affairs, and so on. However, the volume of hyperspec-
tral image is so large that a 16-bit AVIRIS image with size
of 512 × 512 × 224 will occupy 112 MB. Therefore, efficient
compression algorithms are required to reduce the cost of
equipment storage or bandwidth.
Lossy-to-lossless compression will be of great importance
in telemedicine and satellite communications for legal reasons
or research requirements. To realize scalable coding, most of
the state-of-the-art compression methods adopt 3-D discrete
wavelet transform (DWT) [1]–[3] or DWT/Karhunen–Loève
transform (KLT) [4]–[6], where 9/7 floating-point filter is al-
Manuscript received October 21, 2008; revised January 17, 2009 and
March 13, 2009. First published June 16, 2009; current version published
July 4, 2009. This work was supported in part by the National Science
Foundation of China under Grants 60607010 and 60672125, by the Program for
Cheung Kong Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT0645),
and by the Key Scientific and Technological Innovation Special Projects of
Shaanxi “13115” under Grant 2007ZDKG-55.
The authors are with the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and
Image Understanding of Ministry of Education of China, Institute of Intelli-
gent Information Processing, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China (e-mail:
wanglei0912@mail.xidian.edu.cn; wujj@mail.xidian.edu.cn; lchjiao@mail.
xidian.edu.cn; gmshi@xidian.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2009.2021674
ways used for decorrelation in lossy compression. Lossless
compression schemes include methods based on vector quan-
tization, prediction, integer transform, and so on. Although
prediction-based methods perform well, they do not have the
ability of realizing progressive lossy-to-lossless compression
which is owned by transform-based method [7]. Sweldens [8],
[9] proposed the lifting scheme for the realization of wavelet
transforms (WTs). Bilgin et al. [10] introduced reversible
integer WT in the application of 3-D image compression.
Xiong et al. [11] applied 3-D integer WT in medical image
compression and pointed out that the transform has to be unitary
to achieve good lossy coding performance. Some researchers
have studied integer KLT for spectral decorrelation. Hao and
Shi [12] proposed reversible integer KLT, and Galli and Salzo
[13] improved it. However, in spatial domain, integer WTs are
still applied as common methods. A drawback of a wavelet-
based compression method is that 5/3DWT is usually applied
instead of 9/7DWT in lossy-to-lossless compression schemes,
and this will lead to performance degradation. Another disad-
vantage of DWT is that it cannot compete with DCT due to the
constraint of CPU and computer memory, particularly in real-
time and low-complexity applications, because the computing
complexity of WT increases exponentially when the image size
increases [14].
DCT has its own special advantages such as low memory
cost, flexibility at block-by-block level, parallel processing, etc.
Tran et al. [15] have designed pre- and postfilters to improve
the performance of DCT and called the combination as time-
domain lapped transform (TDLT). The rationale behind this
method is that, within the filtered block, the pixels are as
homogenous as possible, and this will be helpful for improving
transform efficiency. Although TDLT performs even better than
DWT does in the energy compatibility and lossy compression,
it does not perform well in the lossless compression where the
reversible transform is required. In fact, for hyperspectral image
compression, completely reversible transform method is always
required to realize lossy-to-lossless coding.
In this letter, we take a practical and innovative approach to
replace integer WT with integer reversible TDLT (RTDLT) in
the spatial domain, and the RTDLT is realized by the improved
matrix factorization method. RTDLT can realize integer re-
versible transform, and hence, we adopted a progressive lossy-
to-lossless hyperspectral image compression method based on
RTDLT and reversible KLT (RKLT). Block transforming coeffi-
cients in the spatial domain would be reorganized into subband
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