Distributed source coding of hyperspectral images

A first attempt to exploit Distributed Source Coding (DSC) principles for the lossless compression of hyperspectral images is presented. The DSC paradigm is exploited to design a very light coder which minimizes the exploitation of the correlation between the image bands. In this way we managed to move the computational complexity from the encoder to the decoder, thus matching the needs of classical acquisition system where compression is achieved on board of the aerial platform and decoding at the ground station. Though the encoder does not explicitly exploit inter-band correlation, the achieved bit rate is about 1 b/p lower than classical 2D schemes such as JPEG-LS or CALID 2D, and only about 1 b/p higher than the best performing, and much more complex, 3D schemes.