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[fitsbits] FITS Image Compression Paper and Software
Notice of a new FITS image compression publication and related softwa
A paper entitled "Lossless Astronomical Image Compression and the Effects of Noise" by W. Pence, R. Seaman, and R. White has recently been accepted by the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. A preprint of the paper is currently available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.2140 . This paper demonstrates how the amount of incompressible noise in an image determines how much that image can be losslessly compressed. It compares the performance of the Rice, Hcompress, GZIP and PLIO compression algorithms, as used within the FITS Tiled Image Compression convention, on a large sample of astronomical CCD images. Overall, the Rice algorithm provides the best combination of speed and compression ratio. In particular, Rice gives about 1.4 time better compression than using GZIP to compress the FITS file and is 2 - 3 times faster. A growing number of software systems (e.g., those built on top of CFITSIO and ds9) are able to directly read FITS images that are in this tiled compressed image format. The image compression software used in this study is available in the form of a pair of image compression and decompression programs called fpack and funpack. These programs are analogous to gzip and gunzip and can be invoked on the command line to compress and uncompress any FITS image. The source code and pre-built binary versions for the most common computer platforms are available from http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fpack/ . Bill Pence Rob Seaman Rick White |
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