ASTRONOMICAL IMAGE COMPRESSION BASED ON NOISE SUPPRESSION

We review methods which are widely used for compression of astronomica l images. These include multiresolution approaches. We use such an app roach, a pyramidal median transform, which is followed by noise suppre ssion at each resolution scale. To preserve photometric and astrometri c fidelity to the input image, a multiresolution astronomical-object s upport is used. We discuss the common astronomical noise models (addit ive Poisson, Gaussian, and Poisson plus Gaussian). A range of examples on digitized plate, and on CCD, image data is used to show the effect iveness of this approach.