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Main Authors: Downes, Justin, Saltwick, Sam, Chen, Anthony
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17555
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author Downes, Justin
Saltwick, Sam
Chen, Anthony
author_facet Downes, Justin
Saltwick, Sam
Chen, Anthony
contents The compression of satellite imagery remains an important research area as hundreds of terabytes of images are collected every day, which drives up storage and bandwidth costs. Although progress has been made in increasing the resolution of these satellite images, many downstream tasks are only interested in small regions of any given image. These areas of interest vary by task but, once known, can be used to optimize how information within the image is encoded. Whereas standard image encoding methods, even those optimized for remote sensing, work on the whole image equally, there are emerging methods that can be guided by saliency maps to focus on important areas. In this work we show how imagery preprocessing techniques driven by saliency maps can be used with traditional lossy compression coding standards to create variable rate image compression within a single large satellite image. Specifically, we use variable sized smoothing kernels that map to different quantized saliency levels to process imagery pixels in order to optimize downstream compression and encoding schemes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17555
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Saliency Driven Imagery Preprocessing for Efficient Compression -- Industrial Paper
Downes, Justin
Saltwick, Sam
Chen, Anthony
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The compression of satellite imagery remains an important research area as hundreds of terabytes of images are collected every day, which drives up storage and bandwidth costs. Although progress has been made in increasing the resolution of these satellite images, many downstream tasks are only interested in small regions of any given image. These areas of interest vary by task but, once known, can be used to optimize how information within the image is encoded. Whereas standard image encoding methods, even those optimized for remote sensing, work on the whole image equally, there are emerging methods that can be guided by saliency maps to focus on important areas. In this work we show how imagery preprocessing techniques driven by saliency maps can be used with traditional lossy compression coding standards to create variable rate image compression within a single large satellite image. Specifically, we use variable sized smoothing kernels that map to different quantized saliency levels to process imagery pixels in order to optimize downstream compression and encoding schemes.
title Saliency Driven Imagery Preprocessing for Efficient Compression -- Industrial Paper
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17555