Compression of DSM Files Based on Quad BTC for Terrain Reference Flight

In this paper, we propose Quad BTC that compresses DSM files to allow random access for TRF (Terrain Referenced Flight). The terrain data used for TRF has a large data capacity to be stored in the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), so its size must be reduced through compression. Conventional BTC (Block Truncation Coding) based compression methods are suitable for TRF because it can decode randomly accessing specific coordinates. However, These conventional methods have a problem that the error increases because the deviation of the data increases as the size of the block increases. In this paper, we propose Quad BTC method that adaptively divides a block in to 4 sub blocks and compresses to solve this problem. The proposed method may reduce errors because the size of the sub block can be adjusted within the block. Through simulation using actual terrain data, it is verified that Quad BTC has less error at the same compression ratio than conventional BTC and AM BTC.