remote sensing Article Reduced-Complexity End-to-End Variational Autoencoder for on Board Satellite Image Compression Vinicius Alves de Oliveira 1,2,* , Marie Chabert 1 , Thomas Oberlin 3 , Charly Poulliat 1, Mickael Bruno 4, Christophe Latry 4, Mikael Carlavan 5, Simon Henrot 5, Frederic Falzon 5 and Roberto Camarero 6 1 IRIT/INP-ENSEEIHT, University of Toulouse, 31071 Toulouse, France;
[email protected] (M.C.);
[email protected] (C.P.) 2 Telecommunications for Space and Aeronautics (TéSA) Laboratory, 31500 Toulouse, France 3 ISAE-SUPAERO, University of Toulouse, 31055 Toulouse, France;
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[email protected] (C.L.) 5 Thales Alenia Space, 06150 Cannes, France;
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[email protected] (F.F.) 6 ESA, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands;
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[email protected] Abstract: Recently, convolutional neural networks have been successfully applied to lossy image compression. End-to-end optimized autoencoders, possibly variational, are able to dramatically outperform traditional transform coding schemes in terms of rate-distortion trade-off; however, this is at the cost of a higher computational complexity. An intensive training step on huge databases allows autoencoders to learn jointly the image representation and its probability distribution, pos- sibly using a non-parametric density model or a hyperprior auxiliary autoencoder to eliminate the need for prior knowledge. However, in the context of on board satellite compression, time and memory complexities are submitted to strong constraints.