Compression of AVHRR images by wavelet packets

AVHRR is an imager flying on polar meteorological satellites that, due to its spatial resolution (about 1 km at Nadir view), produces a huge amount of data. A method based on the wavelet packet transform is devised to compress AVHRR images. The method is driven by the compression error (application dependent), so that different types of images have the same quality. The best basis wavelet packet is chosen by L1 norm criterion that was found to be the most suited for the problem at hand. Ability of the compression method to preserve most fine structures of the images even at the highest resolution is demonstrated based on some examples. Comparison with wavelet algorithms is performed.