Patent ID: 6879716

Claim:
A method of compressing a multispectral image composed of a plurality of spectral images of an object captured in a wavelength range divided into a plurality of bands, comprising the steps of: segmenting said multispectral image into a plurality of tile images; performing principal component analysis on respective tile images to obtain for each tile image a principal component number of sets of principal component vectors and principal component images for the multispectral image; determining from said plurality of sets, for each tile image, an optimum principal component number of sets of optimum principal component vectors and corresponding optimum principal component images that optimally represent image information about the multispectral image; and expressing compressed image data for said multispectral image by means of at least said optimum principal component number of sets of optimum principal component images and optimum principal component vectors for each tile image, wherein the compressed image data for said multispectral image are expressed not only by said optimum principal component number of set of said optimum principal component images and said optimum principal component vectors but also by tile image information having information about tile numbers of said tile images, a tile position and an image size of said tile images.