Pyramid-based multiresolution tiling for interactive viewing of remote sensing images

Abstract

The size of remotely sensed imagery continues to grow at rapid rates with the advent of new high resolution sensors. Remote sensing images contain huge amount of geographical information that reflects the complexity of geographical features and spatial structures. Image mosaics covering large geographical regions at multiple resolutions are also becoming more prevalent. New techniques are needed to efficiently store and quickly retrieve such large datasets for interactive viewing on computers with physical memory many times smaller than the size of the data to be viewed. The pyramid data structure, known also as hierarchical architecture, provides a means of describing images at different level of details. In this paper, we are presenting a multiresolution tiling technique that uses Bounded Irregular Pyramid structure to represent in a compact form and store/retrieve remote sensing images for interactive viewing on a remote machine. In this study, the proposed representation, its encoding and decoding algorithms were developed and applied to remote sensing images; the fidelity and efficiency of the algorithms and their relationship with the spatial complexity of the images were evaluated.