Multispectral transforms using convolution neural networks for remote sensing multispectral image compression

A multispectral image is a three-order tensor since it is a three-dimensional matrix, i.e., one spectral dimension and two spatial position dimensions. Multispectral image compression can be achieved by means of the advantages of tensor decomposition (TD), such as Nonnegative Tucker Decomposition (NTD). Unfortunately, the TD suffers from high calculation complexity and cannot be used in the on-board low-complexity case (e.g., multispectral cameras) that the hardware resources and power are limited. Here, we propose a low-complexity compression approach for multispectral images based on convolution neural networks (CNNs) with NTD. We construct a new spectral transform using CNNs, where the CNNs are able to transform the three-dimension spectraltensor from large-scale to a small-scale version. The NTD resources only allocate the small-scale three-dimension tensor to improve calculation efficiency. We obtain the optimized small-scale spectral tensor by the minimization of original and reconstructed three-dimension spectral tensor in self-learning CNNs. Then, the NTD is applied to the optimized three-dimension spectral tensor in the DCT domain to obtain the high compression performance. We experimentally confirmed the proposed method on multispectral images. Compared to the case that the new spectral tensor transform with CNNs is not applied to the original three-dimension spectral tensor at the same compression bit-rates, the reconstructed image quality could be improved. Compared with the full NTD-based method, the computation efficiency was obviously improved with only a small sacrifices of PSNR without affecting the quality of images.