Abstract
For future solar missions as well as ground-based telescopes, efficient ways to return and process data have become increasingly important. Solar Orbiter, which is the next ESA/NASA mission to explore the Sun and the heliosphere, is a deep-space mission, which implies a limited telemetry rate that makes efficient onboard data compression a necessity to achieve the mission science goals. Missions like the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and future ground-based telescopes such as the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, on the other hand, face the challenge of making petabyte-sized solar data archives accessible to the solar community. New image compression standards address these challenges by implementing efficient and flexible compression algorithms that can be tailored to user requirements. We analyse solar images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument onboard SDO to study the effect of lossy JPEG2000 (from the Joint Photographic Experts Group 2000) image compression at different bitrates. To assess the quality of compressed images, we use the mean structural similarity (MSSIM) index as well as the widely used peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as metrics and compare the two in the context of solar EUV images. In addition, we perform tests to validate the scientific use of the lossily compressed images by analysing examples of an on-disc and off-limb coronal-loop oscillation time-series observed by AIA/SDO.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Berger, T.E., de Pontieu, B., Fletcher, L., Schrijver, C.J., Tarbell, T.D., Title, A.M.: 1999, What is Moss? Solar Phys. 190, 409. DOI . ADS .
Boerner, P., Edwards, C., Lemen, J., Rausch, A., Schrijver, C., Shine, R., Shing, L., Stern, R., Tarbell, T., Title, A., Wolfson, C.J., Soufli, R., Spiller, E., Gullikson, E., McKenzie, D., Windt, D., Golub, L., Podgorski, W., Testa, P., Weber, M.: 2012, Initial calibration of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Solar Phys. 275, 41.
Gissot, S., Pylyser, E., Hochedez, J.-F., Devaux, F.-O., Correa, P., Rouvroy, G., Inhester, B., Kennedy, T., Auchère, F.: 2009, Quality measures for an optimized JPEG2000-like EUI compression. In: 3rd Solar Orbiter Workshop, 2009. https://publi2-as.oma.be/record/2907 .
Jain, R., Maurya, R.A., Hindman, B.W.: 2015, Fundamental-mode oscillations of two coronal loops within a solar magnetic arcade. Astrophys. J. Lett. 804, L19. DOI . ADS .
Lemen, J.R., Title, A.M., Akin, D.J., Boerner, P.F., Chou, C., Drake, J.F., Duncan, D.W., Edwards, C.G., Friedlaender, F.M., Heyman, G.F., Hurlburt, N.E., Katz, N.L., Kushner, G.D., Levay, M., Lindgren, R.W., Mathur, D.P., McFeaters, E.L., Mitchell, S., Rehse, R.A., Schrijver, C.J., Springer, L.A., Stern, R.A., Tarbell, T.D., Wuelser, J.-P., Wolfson, C.J., Yanari, C., Bookbinder, J.A., Cheimets, P.N., Caldwell, D., Deluca, E.E., Gates, R., Golub, L., Park, S., Podgorski, W.A., Bush, R.I., Scherrer, P.H., Gummin, M.A., Smith, P., Auker, G., Jerram, P., Pool, P., Soufli, R., Windt, D.L., Beardsley, S., Clapp, M., Lang, J., Waltham, N.: 2012, The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Solar Phys. 275, 17.
Löptien, B., Birch, A.C., Duvall, T.L., Gizon, L., Schou, J.: 2016, Data compression for local correlation tracking of solar granulation. Astron. Astrophys. 587, A9. DOI . ADS .
Markwardt, C.B.: 2009, Non-linear least-squares fitting in IDL with MPFIT. In: Bohlender, D.A., Durand, D., Dowler, P. (eds.) Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XVIII, Astron. Soc. Pacific C.S. 411, 251. ADS .
Müller, D., Fleck, B., Dimitoglou, G., Caplins, B.W., Amadigwe, D.E., Ortiz, J.P.G., Wamsler, B., Alexanderian, A., Hughitt, V.K., Ireland, J.: 2009, JHelioviewer: visualizing large sets of solar images using JPEG 2000. Comput. Sci. Eng. 11(5), 38.
Nicula, B., Berghmans, D., Hochedez, J.-F.: 2005, Poisson recoding of solar images for enhanced compression. Solar Phys. 228, 253.
Peters, S.M., Kitaeff, V.V.: 2014, The impact of JPEG2000 lossy compression on the scientific quality of radio astronomy imagery. Astron. Comput. 6, 41. DOI . ADS .
Skodras, A., Christopoulos, C., Ebrahimi, T.: 2001, The JPEG 2000 still image compression standard. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 18, 36.
Wang, Z., Bovik, A.C.: 2009, Mean squared error: love it or leave it? A new look at signal fidelity measures. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 26(1), 98. DOI .
Wang, Z., Simoncelli, E.P., Bovik, A.C.: 2003, Multiscale structural similarity for image quality assessment. In: 37th Asilomar Conf. on Signals, Systems and Computers 2, 1398. DOI .
Wang, Z., Bovik, A.C., Sheikh, H.R., Simoncelli, E.P.: 2004, Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 13(4), 600.
White, R.S., Verwichte, E.: 2012, Transverse coronal loop oscillations seen in unprecedented detail by AIA/SDO. Astron. Astrophys. 537, A49.
Acknowledgements
AIA/SDO data are provided by the Joint Science Operations Center Science Data Processing. This project has received funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK) and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 647214). I. De Moortel and C. E. Fischer thank the ESTEC/ESA visitorship program for support. We have made use of the Coyote IDL library at www.idlcoyote.com .
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fischer, C.E., Müller, D. & De Moortel, I. JPEG2000 Image Compression on Solar EUV Images. Sol Phys 292, 16 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-016-1038-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-016-1038-3