User-Oriented Evaluation Of Compression For Motion Imagery - Art. No. 65460b

Motion imagery will play a critical role in future intelligence and military missions. The ability to provide a real time, dynamic view and persistent surveillance makes motion imagery a valuable source of information. The ability to collect, process, transmit, and exploit this rich source of information depends on the sensor capabilities, the available communications channels, and the availability of suitable exploitation tools. While sensor technology has progressed dramatically and various exploitation tools exist or are under development, the bandwidth required for transmitting motion imagery data remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a user-oriented evaluation of several methods for compression of motion imagery. We explore various codecs and bitrates for both inter- and intra-frame encoding. The analysis quantifies the effects of compression in terms of the interpretability of motion imagery, i.e., the ability of imagery analysts to perform common image exploitation tasks. The findings have implications for sensor system design, systems architecture, and mission planning