Performance comparison of compression methods for segmented space reflector telescope image

The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) is expected to produce a vast amount of raw images that will have to be stored in scarce on-board memory and transmitted through a limited communication link. Therefore, a key objective is to develop a data compression scheme that both substantially reduces the amount of data, and lends itself to be implemented into an efficient parallel architecture. This paper will present a comparison of several compression algorithms applied to astronomical images' In particular, image compression using wavelet transforms, which has shown promising performance and features, will be investigated and their compression performance on astronomical images are evaluated. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the error resilience and progressive features of different wavelet-based codec. Based on the comparison, a desirable compression algorithm is suggested for astronomical images.