A Novel Rate Control Algorithm for Onboard Predictive Coding of Multispectral and Hyperspectral Images

Predictive coding is attractive for compression onboard of spacecrafts thanks to its low computational complexity, modest memory requirements and the ability to accurately control quality on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Traditionally, predictive compression focused on the lossless and near-lossless modes of operation where the maximum error can be bounded but the rate of the compressed image is variable. Rate control is considered a challenging problem for predictive encoders due to the dependencies between quantization and prediction in the feedback loop, and the lack of a signal representation that packs the signal's energy into few coefficients. In this paper, we show that it is possible to design a rate control scheme intended for onboard implementation. In particular, we propose a general framework to select quantizers in each spatial and spectral region of an image so as to achieve the desired target rate while minimizing distortion. The rate control algorithm allows to achieve lossy, near-lossless compression, and any in-between type of compression, e.g., lossy compression with a near-lossless constraint. While this framework is independent of the specific predictor used, in order to show its performance, in this paper we tailor it to the predictor adopted by the CCSDS-123 lossless compression standard, obtaining an extension that allows to perform lossless, near-lossless and lossy compression in a single package. We show that the rate controller has excellent performance in terms of accuracy in the output rate, rate-distortion characteristics and is extremely competitive with respect to state-of-the-art transform coding

Compressive Signal Processing with Circulant Sensing Matrices

Compressive sensing achieves effective dimensionality reduction of signals, under a sparsity constraint, by means of a small number of random measurements acquired through a sensing matrix. In a signal processing system, the problem arises of processing the random projections directly, without first reconstructing the signal. In this paper, we show that circulant sensing matrices allow to perform a variety of classical signal processing tasks such as filtering, interpolation, registration, transforms, and so forth, directly in the compressed domain and in an exact fashion, \emph{i.e.}, without relying on estimators as proposed in the existing literature. The advantage of the techniques presented in this paper is to enable direct measurement-to-measurement transformations, without the need of costly recovery procedures

Graded quantization for multiple description coding of compressive measurements

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging paradigm for acquisition of compressed representations of a sparse signal. Its low complexity is appealing for resource-constrained scenarios like sensor networks. However, such scenarios are often coupled with unreliable communication channels and providing robust transmission of the acquired data to a receiver is an issue. Multiple description coding (MDC) effectively combats channel losses for systems without feedback, thus raising the interest in developing MDC methods explicitly designed for the CS framework, and exploiting its properties. We propose a method called Graded Quantization (CS-GQ) that leverages the democratic property of compressive measurements to effectively implement MDC, and we provide methods to optimize its performance. A novel decoding algorithm based on the alternating directions method of multipliers is derived to reconstruct signals from a limited number of received descriptions. Simulations are performed to assess the performance of CS-GQ against other methods in presence of packet losses. The proposed method is successful at providing robust coding of CS measurements and outperforms other schemes for the considered test metrics

Image Denoising with Graph-Convolutional Neural Networks

Recovering an image from a noisy observation is a key problem in signal processing. Recently, it has been shown that data-driven approaches employing convolutional neural networks can outperform classical model-based techniques, because they can capture more powerful and discriminative features. However, since these methods are based on convolutional operations, they are only capable of exploiting local similarities without taking into account non-local self-similarities. In this paper we propose a convolutional neural network that employs graph-convolutional layers in order to exploit both local and non-local similarities. The graph-convolutional layers dynamically construct neighborhoods in the feature space to detect latent correlations in the feature maps produced by the hidden layers. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms classical convolutional neural networks for the denoising task.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 201

Sampling of graph signals via randomized local aggregations

Sampling of signals defined over the nodes of a graph is one of the crucial problems in graph signal processing. While in classical signal processing sampling is a well defined operation, when we consider a graph signal many new challenges arise and defining an efficient sampling strategy is not straightforward. Recently, several works have addressed this problem. The most common techniques select a subset of nodes to reconstruct the entire signal. However, such methods often require the knowledge of the signal support and the computation of the sparsity basis before sampling. Instead, in this paper we propose a new approach to this issue. We introduce a novel technique that combines localized sampling with compressed sensing. We first choose a subset of nodes and then, for each node of the subset, we compute random linear combinations of signal coefficients localized at the node itself and its neighborhood. The proposed method provides theoretical guarantees in terms of reconstruction and stability to noise for any graph and any orthonormal basis, even when the support is not known.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, 201

Joint recovery algorithms using difference of innovations for distributed compressed sensing

Distributed compressed sensing is concerned with representing an ensemble of jointly sparse signals using as few linear measurements as possible. Two novel joint reconstruction algorithms for distributed compressed sensing are presented in this paper. These algorithms are based on the idea of using one of the signals as side information; this allows to exploit joint sparsity in a more effective way with respect to existing schemes. They provide gains in reconstruction quality, especially when the nodes acquire few measurements, so that the system is able to operate with fewer measurements than is required by other existing schemes. We show that the algorithms achieve better performance with respect to the state-of-the-art.Comment: Conference Record of the Forty Seventh Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (ASILOMAR), 201

Super-resolved multi-temporal segmentation with deep permutation-invariant networks

Multi-image super-resolution from multi-temporal satellite acquisitions of a scene has recently enjoyed great success thanks to new deep learning models. In this paper, we go beyond classic image reconstruction at a higher resolution by studying a super-resolved inference problem, namely semantic segmentation at a spatial resolution higher than the one of sensing platform. We expand upon recently proposed models exploiting temporal permutation invariance with a multi-resolution fusion module able to infer the rich semantic information needed by the segmentation task. The model presented in this paper has recently won the AI4EO challenge on Enhanced Sentinel 2 Agriculture.Comment: IGARSS 202

Fast and Lightweight Rate Control for Onboard Predictive Coding of Hyperspectral Images

Predictive coding is attractive for compression of hyperspecral images onboard of spacecrafts in light of the excellent rate-distortion performance and low complexity of recent schemes. In this letter we propose a rate control algorithm and integrate it in a lossy extension to the CCSDS-123 lossless compression recommendation. The proposed rate algorithm overhauls our previous scheme by being orders of magnitude faster and simpler to implement, while still providing the same accuracy in terms of output rate and comparable or better image quality

Binary Adaptive Embeddings from Order Statistics of Random Projections

We use some of the largest order statistics of the random projections of a reference signal to construct a binary embedding that is adapted to signals correlated with such signal. The embedding is characterized from the analytical standpoint and shown to provide improved performance on tasks such as classification in a reduced-dimensionality space

Image dequantization for hyperspectral lossy compression with convolutional neural networks

Significant work has been devoted to methods based on predictive coding for onboard compression of hyperspectral images. This is supported by the new CCSDS 123.0-B-2 recommendation for lossless and near-lossless compression. While lossless compression can achieve high throughput, it can only achieve limited compression ratios. The introduction of a quantizer and local decoder in the prediction loop allows to implement lossy compression with good rate-performance. However, the need to have a locally decoded version of a causal neighborhood of the current pixel under coding is a significant limiting factor in the throughput such encoder can achieve. In this work, we study the rate-distortion performance of a significantly simpler and faster onboard compressor based on prequantizing the pixels of the hyperspectral image and applying a lossless compressor (such as the lossless CCSDS CCSDS 123.0-B-2) to the quantized pixels. While this is suboptimal in terms of rate-distortion performance compared to having an in-loop quantizer, we compensate the lower quality with an on-ground post-processor based on modeling the distortion residual with a convolutional neural network. The task of the neural network is to learn the statistics of the quantization error and apply a dequantization model to restore the image