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Paper: Optimal Compression of Floating-Point FITS Images
Volume: 434, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX
Page: 365
Authors: Pence, W. D.; White, R. L.; Seaman, R.
Abstract: Lossless compression (e.g., with GZIP) of floating-point format astronomical FITS images is ineffective and typically only reduces the file size by 10% to 30%. We describe a much more effective compression method that is supported by the publicly available fpack and funpack FITS image compression utilities that can compress floating point images by a factor of 10 without loss of significant scientific precision. A “subtractive dithering” technique is described which permits coarser quantization (and thus higher compression) than is possible with simple scaling methods.
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