Remote sensing applications have gained in popularity in recent years, which has resulted in vast amounts of data being produced on a daily basis. Managing and delivering large sets of data becomes extremely difficult and resource demanding for the data vendors, but even more for individual users and third party stakeholders. Hence, research in the field of efficient remote sensing data handling and manipulation has become a very active research topic (from both storage and communication perspectives). Driven by the rapid growth in the volume of optical satellite measurements, in this work we explore the lossy compression technique for multispectral satellite images. We give a comprehensive analysis of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) still-image intra coding part applied to the multispectral image data. Thereafter, we analyze the impact of the distortions introduced by the HEVC’s intra compression in the general case, as well as in the specific context of crop classification application. Results show that HEVC’s intra coding achieves better trade-off between compression gain and image quality, as compared to standard JPEG 2000 solution. On the other hand, this also reflects in the better performance of the designed pixel-based classifier in the analyzed crop classification task. We show that HEVC can obtain up to 150:1 compression ratio, when observing compression in the context of specific application, without significantly losing on classification performance compared to classifier trained and applied on raw data. In comparison, in order to maintain the same performance, JPEG 2000 allows compression ratio up to 70:1.

Motivated by the superior performance of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), and driven by the rapid growth in data volume produced by seismic surveys, in this work we explore a 32 bits per pixel (b/p) extension of the HEVC codec for compression of seismic data. We propose to reassemble seismic slices in a format that corresponds to video signal and benefit from the coding gain achieved by HEVC inter mode, besides the possible advantages of the (still image) HEVC intra mode. To this end, we modify almost all components of the original HEVC codec to cater for high bit-depth coding of seismic data: Lagrange multiplier used in optimization of the coding parameters has been adapted to the new data statistics, core transform and quantization have been reimplemented to handle the increased bit-depth range, and modified adaptive binary arithmetic coder has been employed for efficient entropy coding. Even though the new codec after implementation of the proposed modifications goes beyond the standardized HEVC, it still maintains a generic HEVC structure, and it is developed under the general HEVC framework. Thus, we tailored a specific codec design which, when compared to the JPEG-XR and commercial wavelet-based codec, significantly improves the peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) vs. compression ratio performance for 32 b/p seismic data. Depending on a configuration, PSNR gain goes from 3.39 dB up to 9.48 dB. Also, relying on the specific characteristics of seismic data, we proposed an optimized encoder that reduces encoding time by 67.17% for All-I configuration on trace image dataset, and 67.39% for All-I, 97.96% for P2-configuration and 98.64% for B-configuration on 3D wavefield dataset, with negligible coding performance losses.