Lossless, Multi-Spectral Data Compressor for Improved Compression for Pushbroom-Type Instruments

A low-complexity lossless algorithm for compression of multispectral data has been developed that takes into account pushbroom-type multispectral imagers’ properties in order to make the file compression more effective. These types of imagers use a detector array to acquire data in spatial-spectral slices. Each detector element corresponds to a specific spectral band and cross-track position. Because the characteristics of detector elements generally vary somewhat from element to element, cross-track adjacent samples in a given spectral band are not as similar as they are in an instrument that uses the same detector for all samples in a given spectral band (e.g. in a whiskbroom-type instrument). Along-track adjacent samples will tend to be very similar.