A REGULARIZED IMAGE-RESTORATION ALGORITHM FOR LOSSY COMPRESSION IN ASTRONOMY

Astronomical images currently provide large amounts of data. Lossy com pression algorithms have recently been developed for high compression ratios. These compression techniques introduce distortion in the compr essed images and for high compression ratios, a blocking effect appear s. We propose a modified compression algorithm based on the hcompress scheme. and we introduce a new decompression method based on the regul arization theory. The image is restored scale by scale in a multiresol ution scheme and the information lost during the compression is recove red by applying a Tikhonov regularization constraint. The experimental results show that the blocking effect is reduced and some measurement s made on a simulated image show that the astrometric and the photomet ric properties of the restored images are improved.