Benchmarking neural lossless compression algorithms on multi-purpose astronomical image data

The site conditions that make astronomical observatories in space and on the ground so desirable—cold and dark—demand a physical remoteness that leads to limited data transmission capabilities. Such transmission limitations directly bottleneck the amount of data that can be acquired. Thus, improving data compression capabilities, which then allows for more data to be obtained, can directly benefit the scientific impact of observatories. Traditional methods for compressing astrophysical data are manually designed. Neural data compression, on the other hand, holds the promise of learning compression algorithms end-to-end from data while leveraging the spatial, temporal, and wavelength structures of astronomical images. This paper introduces AstroCompress: a neural compression challenge for astrophysics data, featuring four new datasets (and one legacy dataset) with 16-bit unsigned integer imaging data in various modes: space-based, ground-based, multi-wavelength, and time-series imaging. We provide code for easily accessing the data and benchmark seven compression methods (three neural and four non-neural, including all practical state-of-the-art algorithms).Our results indicate that neural compression techniques can enhance data collection at observatories, and provide guidance on the adoption of neural compression in scientific applications.