Wavelet-based compression of infrared images using multiscale edges

Infrared technology has found many exciting and useful applications in the fields ranging from surveillance to astronomy. Therefore the volume of IR data being collected is increasing rapidly. Thus, there is a strong interest in developing image encoding and compression algorithms, specifically for infrared images.

Most compression schemes have been developed for photographic images, and very little study exists on IR image coding. These may not be optimized or even appropriate for Infrared data, because they do not take into consideration the peculiar characteristics of infrared images.

For this purpose, we study a compression scheme based on edge detection and noise reduction within the wavelet framework. We begin by analyzing the effectiveness of wavelet based multi-scale edge scheme proposed by Mallat and Zhong [1] for compression and noise removal, and optimize it to suit the characteristics of infrared images.