ICER

ICER is a wavelet-based image compression file format used by the NASA Mars Rovers. ICER has both lossy and lossless compression modes.

The Mars Exploration Rovers “Spirit” (MER-A) and “Opportunity” (MER-B) both use ICER. Onboard image compression is used extensively to make best use of the downlink resources. The Mars Science Lab supports the use of ICER for its navigation cameras (but all other cameras use other file formats).

Most of the MER images are compressed with the ICER image compression software. The remaining MER images that are compressed make use of modified Low Complexity Lossless Compression (LOCO) software, a lossless submode of ICER.

ICER is a wavelet-based image compressor that allows for a graceful trade-off between the amount of compression (expressed in terms of compressed data volume in bits/pixel) and the resulting degradation in image quality (distortion). ICER has some similarities to JPEG2000, with respect to select wavelet operations.

The development of ICER was driven by the desire to achieve high compression performance while meeting the specialized needs of deep space applications.

To control the image quality and amount of compression in ICER, the user specifies a byte quota (the nominal number of bytes to be used to store the compressed image) and a quality level parameter (which is essentially a quality goal).

This arrangement provides added flexibility compared to compressors (like the JPEG compressor used on Mars Pathfinder) that provide only a single parameter to control image quality. Using ICER, when the primary concern is the bandwidth available to transmit the compressed image, one can set the quality goal to lossless and the given byte quota will determine the amount of compression obtained.

At the other extreme—when the only important consideration is a minimum acceptable image quality it is possible to specify sufficiently large byte quota and the amount of compression will be determined by the quality level specified.

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