  Ptychography is a computational imaging technique that has risen in
popularity in the x-ray and electron microscopy communities in the past half
decade. One of the reasons for this success is the development of new high
performance electron detectors with increased dynamic range and readout speed,
both of which are necessary for a successful application of this technique.
Despite the advances made in computing power, processing the recorded data
remains a challenging task, and the growth in data rate has made the size of
the resulting datasets a bottleneck for the whole process. Here we present an
investigation into lossy compression methods for electron diffraction patterns
that retain the necessary information for ptychographic reconstructions, yet
lead to a decrease in data set size by three or four orders of magnitude. We
apply several compression methods to both simulated and experimental data - all
with promising results.
