Physical Optics Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N141-048

Description

To address the Navy need for LCS unmanned vehicle sensor data compression, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new image compression method operating at an improved rate. It is based on image analysis and new data organization strategies following wavelet transformation. The innovation in POCs Content Aware Image Compression (CAIC) system will enable the compression to be both bandwidth efficient and error tolerant. Therefore, this method offers a compression rate of at least 8:1 for visually lossless compression on sonar and camera images, which directly address the requirements for data transfer from RMMVs to LCSs. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of the new method based on compression efficiency and error resilience by designing, developing the key software components of the new compression approach, and testing on AN/AQS-20 sensor images and RMMV obstacle avoidance camera images. In Phase II, POC plans to develop a full-scale prototype on desktop as well as embedded systems. The operational evaluation of the proposed approach is also planned using peak signal-to-noise ratio of the decoded image. We plan to evaluate the algorithm for various compression bit rates and transmission over a wireless communication channel with a wide range of SNRs.