Subjective Evaluation of Compressed SAR Images using JPEG and HEVC intra coding: Sometimes, Compression Improves Usability

Human evaluation of SAR is time-consuming and costly. Typically it requires the indirect usability-based assessment of SAR system components or SAR systems from which the images arose. We investigate an assessment system which aims at finding digital signal processing algorithms to simulate, complement and partly replace the human evaluation of SAR images. To better understand the human evaluation, expert SAR interpreters have been asked to solve tasks on SAR images whose different image qualities result from a specific SAR system by varying the parameter settings of one SAR system component. The SAR system component investigated first is the coding system where the spatial and the amplitude resolution are fundamental parameters.In this paper, we describe first results of a human evaluation with expert interpreters where the two coding standards JPEG and HEVC intra coding were evaluated at different spatial resolutions and data rates. The SAR image quality preferred to work with was identified by the interpreters.