Sar Image Data Compression

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an airborne or spaceborne radar mapping technique for generating high-resolution maps of surface target areas and terrain. Its images usually have big size and contain a large amount of data. So it is a key problem in SAR image data processing that how to compress the image to reduce data amount effectively so that it can be saved or transmitted conveniently.This paper discussed the theory and main problems in image coding based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) after discussing traditional image coding algorithms in order to make an attempt to compress SAR images using DWT. The author compressed two SAR images using DWT and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithms respectively, and compared the results of those two algorithms. The results showed that the DWT algorithm is much better than those traditional image coding algorithms such as DCT algorithm in SAR image compressing.