A Novel and High Performance Data Compression System for Ship-to-Shore Communications
Navy SBIR FY2015.1


Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2015.1
Topic No.: N151-047
Topic Title: A Novel and High Performance Data Compression System for Ship-to-Shore Communications
Proposal No.: N151-047-0281
Firm: Applied Research LLC
9605 Medical Center Drive
Suite 113E
Rockville, Maryland 20850
Contact: Hua-Mei Chen
Phone: (240) 207-2311
Abstract: We propose a novel and high performance compression system that can meet all of the Navy's requirements. We filed an invention disclosure for our system. A patent will be filed soon. First, for non-image data such as 1-D time series data (sensor health, thermal, kinematic), we first propose to apply some preprocessing routines to convert the time series data into a 2-D format so that more efficient lossless compression can be achieved later. Second, we propose to jointly compress the same types of sensor data. This idea was motivated by data compression in sensor networks where the sensor data are correlated. We have applied the above scheme to wind tunnel data compression and observed very good compression performance. Actually, our algorithms outperformed all the existing commercial products in lossless compression. Third, for 2-D images/videos, we propose to directly apply X265, which is applicable to both images and videos. For text data, we propose to apply 7z and for voice data, we propose to apply Opus, which is a freeware that has been widely used in the market. Finally, since RF channel is unreliable and there is transmission errors, we propose to apply novel algorithms at the receiving end to recover corrupted data.
Benefits: There are quite a few types of data (voice, text, and possibly image, videos) that need to be compressed and sent over unreliable RF channels. We can classify them as 1-dimensional (1-D) data such as sensor data, text and voice data, and 2-dimensional (2-D) data such as electro-optical and infrared images/videos. Since the data characteristics are quite different, it is necessary to apply different algorithms to compress the data. For 1-D data, conventional lossless compression algorithms include 7z, Gzip, and a few others. For 2-D data, X265/X264 are the most well-known tool for perceptually lossless compression of images/videos. Our proposed data compression system can be used for ship to shore data transmission applications. Other potential commercial applications include military and civilian applications. In military surveillance and reconnaissance operations, images/videos may need to be downlinked to ground stations. Some small UAVs may not have enough computational resource to execute complex compression algorithms. The market size will be 10 million dollars based on a 10,000 units with a unit price of 1,000 dollars.

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