scope:

The characteristics of instrument data are specified only to the extent necessary to ensure multi-mission support capabilities. The specification does not attempt to quantify the relative bandwidth reduction, the merits of the approaches discussed, or the design requirements for encoders and associated decoders. Some performance information is included in reference [C1].

This Recommended Standard addresses compression of three-dimensional data from imaging spectrometers or atmospheric sounders; such data are often referred to as multi-, hyper-, or ultraspectral images. The standard is applicable to a wide range of space-borne digital data, where the requirement is for a scalable data reduction, including the option to use lossy compression, which allows some loss of fidelity in the process of data compression and decompression.

This Recommended Standard is formulated as a supplemental document that extends an existing Recommended Standard for two-dimensional image compression (reference [1]) to include support for three-dimensional image compression.