Airborne and space-borne hyperspectral imaging is now a useful and conventional tool in remote sensing (RS). It is able to provide valuable information for different applications, such as Earth surface monitoring, oceanology and hydrology, pollution control, and so on.¹ 2. ^{– 3} However, taking into account modern tendencies of increasing spectral and spatial resolution of sensors as well as areas of sensed terrains, the amount of acquired data greatly increases. Then, there is often an urgent need to compress the hyperspectral data intended for transferring, archiving, and dissemination.³ 4. 5. ^{– 6}

This article addresses under which conditions filtering can visibly improve the image quality. The key points are the following. First, we analyze filtering efficiency for 25 test images, from the color image database TID2008. This database allows assessing filter efficiency for images corrupted by different noise types for several levels of noise variance. Second, the limit of filtering efficiency is determined for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) additive noise and compared to the output mean square error of state-of-the-art filters. Third, component-wise and vector denoising is studied, where the latter approach is demonstrated to be more efficient. Fourth, using of modern visual quality metrics, we determine that for which levels of i.i.d. and spatially correlated noise the noise in original images or residual noise and distortions because of filtering in output images are practically invisible. We also demonstrate that it is possible to roughly estimate whether or not the visual quality can clearly be improved by filtering.

The problem of automatic detection of image areas appropriate for accurate estimation of additive noise standard deviation (STD) irrespectively to processed image properties is considered in this paper. For accurate estimation of either image texture or noise STD, we distinguish two complementary informative maps: noise- (NI-) and texture- (TI-) informative ones. The NI map is determined and iteratively upgraded based on the Fisher information on noise STD calculated in scanning window (SW) fashion. Fractional Brownian motion (fBm) model for image texture is used to derive the required Fisher information. To extract final noise STD from NI map, fBm- and DCT-based estimators are implemented. The performance of these two estimators is comparatively assessed on large image database for different noise levels. It is also compared with performance of two competitive state-of-the-art estimators recently published. Utilizing NI map along with DCT-based noise STD estimator has proved to be significantly more efficient.

We address lossy compression of noisy remote sensing images, where the noise is supposed to be spatially uncorrelated (white), additive originally or after a proper variance-stabilizing transformation (VST). In such situations, the so-called optimal operation point (OOP) might exist. The OOP is associated with the parameter that controls compression (e.g., quantization step) for which the compressed image is the closest to the noise-free image according to a certain criterion and is closer than the original noisy image. Lossy compression in the neighborhood of OOP, if it exists, relates to an essential noise filtering effect and some distortions. Then such lossy compression (in the neighborhood of OOP) becomes expedient. However, it may be that OOP does not exist for a given image and the observed noise intensity. In such a situation, it can be reasonable to carry out a more “careful” image compression (with a lower compression ratio). Also, it is expedient to predict the existence of OOP and the compression parameters at this point in advance in order to perform adaptive and automated compression. The OOP existence that can be predicted for some coders based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is shown. The proposed prediction procedure is simple and fast. It presumes the calculation of DCT coefficient statistics in nonoverlapping $8×8pixel$ blocks for a given image and uses an approximating curve obtained in advance. It is shown that it is possible to predict values for both conventional metrics, such as mean square error or peak-signal-to-noise ratio, and some visual quality metrics for the coder parameters that correspond to a possible OOP. The designed prediction procedure is tested on Hyperion and AVIRIS hyperspectral remote sensing data.

Lossy compression is widely used to decrease the size of multichannel remote sensing data. Alongside this positive effect, lossy compression may lead to a negative outcome as making worse image classification. Thus, if possible, lossy compression should be carried out carefully, controlling the quality of compressed images. In this paper, a dependence between classification accuracy of maximum likelihood and neural network classifiers applied to three-channel test and real-life images and quality of compressed images characterized by standard and visual quality metrics is studied. The following is demonstrated. First, a classification accuracy starts to decrease faster when image quality due to compression ratio increasing reaches a distortion visibility threshold. Second, the classes with a wider distribution of features start to “take pixels” from classes with narrower distributions of features. Third, a classification accuracy might depend essentially on the training methodology, i.e., whether features are determined from original data or compressed images. Finally, the drawbacks of pixel-wise classification are shown and some recommendations on how to improve classification accuracy are given.