Visually lossless compression based on JPEG2000 for efficient transmission of high resolution color aerial images

Aerial image collections have experienced exponential growth in size in recent years. These high resolution images are often viewed at a variety of scales. When an image is displayed at reduced scale, maximum quantization step sizes for visually lossless quality become larger. However, previous visually lossless coding algorithms quantize the image with a single set of quantization step sizes, optimized for display at the full resolution level. This implies that if the image is rendered at reduced resolution, there are signicant amounts of extraneous information in the codestream. Thus, in this paper, we propose a method which effectively incorporates multiple quantization step sizes, for various display resolutions, into the JPEG2000 framework. If images are browsed from a remote location, this method can signicantly reduce bandwidth usage by only transmitting the portion of the codestream required for visually lossless reconstruction at the desired resolution. Experimental results for high resolution color aerial images are presented.