Compression of Remote Sensing Images for the PROBA-V Satellite Mission

We investigate compression of remote sensing images with a special geometry of non-square pixels. Two fundamentally different data reduction strategies are compared: a combination of pixel binning with near lossless compression and a method operating at higher compression rates. To measure the real impact of the compression, the image processing flow upto final products is included in the experiments. The effects on sensor non-uniformities and their corrections are explicitly modeled and measured. We conclude that it is preferable to apply higher compression rates than to rely on pixel binning, even if the derived images have lower resolutions.