On-Board Satellite MSS Image Compression

In this work a new method for on-line scene segmentation is developed. In remote sensing a scene is represented by the pixel-oriented features. It is possible to reduce data redundancy by an unsupervised segment-feature extraction process, where the segment-features, rather than the pixelfeatures, are used for multispectral scene representation. The algorithm partitions the observation space into exhaustive set of disjoint segments. Then, pixels belonging to each segment are characterized by segment features. Illustrative examples are presented, and the performance of features is investigated. Results show an average compression more than 25, the classification performance is improved for all classes, and the CPU time required for classification is reduced by the same factor.