High-Performance Compression of Astronomical Images

Astronomical images have some rather unusual characteristics that make many existing image compression techniques either ine ective or inapplicable. A typical image consists of a nearly at background sprinkled with point sources and occasional extended sources. The images are often noisy, so that lossless compression does not work very well; furthermore, the images are usually subjected to stringent quantitative analysis, so any lossy compression method must be proven not to discard useful information, but must instead discard only the noise. Finally, the images can be extremely large. For example, the Space Telescope Science Institute has digitized photographic plates covering the entire sky, generating 1500 images each having 1400