Efficient rate control technique for CCSDS image encoding

For the limitation of data transmission bandwidth and real time transmission demand, generally image compression is required to implement the precise and flexible rate control algorithm. Rate control is an important issue in the image compression field. This paper considers the problem of rate allocation to each encoded segment for CCSDS image compression. One straightforward method is to allocate an equal amount of rate to each segment based on the average of the total number of compressed bytes. The obvious drawback of this method is that different segment will be reconstructed to different quality, so the overall quality of the reconstructed image will not be optimized. For the shortage of the original rate control method, as to improve the overall quality of the reconstructed image, an improved rate control algorithm is proposed for CCSDS image encoding. The key component of the proposed rate control method is the appropriate rate allocation. Experiments on the test images show that the PSNR can be increased at about 0.3dB on average, compared to the original algorithm. Therefore, experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of objective evaluation, and the rate-distortion performance of the reconstructed image is improved.