Secure and Efficient Transmission of Hyperspectral Images for Geosciences Applications

Hyperspectral images are acquired through air-borne or space-borne special cameras (sensors) that collect information coming from the electromagnetic spectrum of the observed terrains. Hyperspectral remote sensing and hyperspectral images are used for a wide range of purposes: originally, they were developed for mining applications and for geology because of the capability of this kind of images to correctly identify various types of underground minerals by analysing the reflected spectrums, but their usage has spread in other application fields, such as ecology, military and surveillance, historical research and even archaeology. The large amount of data obtained by the hyperspectral sensors, the fact that these images are acquired at a high cost by air-borne sensors and that they are generally transmitted to a base, makes it necessary to provide an efficient and secure transmission protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that allows secure and efficient transmission of hyperspectral images, by combining a reversible invisible watermarking scheme, used in conjunction with digital signature techniques, and a state-of-art predictive-based lossless compression algorithm.