Lossy compression of scientific spacecraft data using wavelets. Application to the CASSINI spacecraft data compression

Abstract

This paper presents a lossy coding scheme designed to be board on the Cassini spacecraft which has been launched in 1997 to study Saturn planet. To deal with specific time-frequency data and numerous constraints, our coding algorithm is based on wavelet decomposition associated to an adaptive bit allocation procedure. The performances of our approach are validated by an adapted scientific evaluation.