Design and Evaluation of SAR Image Compression System for Airborne Vehicles

摘要

Airborne vehicles such as fighter aircrafts, helicopters and unmanned air vehicles with numerous sensors on-board are used for smarter surveillance and reconnaissance. In this paper, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image compression system for such airborne vehicles is proposed. The proposed system employs the concepts of steganography and discrete wavelet transform, thus achieving the best of both worlds. A novel attempt is made in this work to compress several SAR images and conceal them in an electro-optic (EO) image captured on-board, before transmitting it to image receiving ground station. The proposed system is evaluated using different wavelets and the results are reported. It is observed that the reconstructed SAR images have PSNR ranging from 31.94 -62.72 dB and the PSNR of stego-image ranges from 60.20 - 70.62 dB with nine SAR images concealed in it. It is also observed that both, stego-images (EO-image) and reconstructed secret images (SAR images) are visually indistinguishable from the original image.