A Fast and Efficient Lossless Compression Technique for Greyscale Images

Abstract

The growth of cloud based remote healthcare and diagnosis services has resulted, Medical Service Providers (MSP) to share diagnositic data across diverse environement. This medical data are accessed across diverse platforms, such as, mobile and web services which needs huge memory for storage. Compression technique helps to address and solve storage requirements and provides for sharing medical data over transmission medium. Loss of data is not acceptable for medical image processing. As a result, this work considers lossless compression for medical in particular and in general any greyscale images. Modified Huffman encoding (MH) is one of the widely used technique for achieving lossless compression. However, due to longer bit length of codewords the existing Modified Huffman (MH) encoding technique is not efficient for medical imaging processing. Firstly, this work presents Modified Refined Huffman (MRH) for performing compression of greyscale and binary images by using diagonal scanning method. Secondly, to minimize the computing time parallel encoding method is used. Experiments are conducted for wide variety of images and performance is evaluated in terms of Compression Ratio, Computation Time and Memory Utilization. The proposed MRH achieves significant performance improvement in terms of Compression Ratio, Computation Time and Memory Usage over its state-of-the-art techniques, such as, LZW, CCITT G4, JBIG2 and Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) Neural Network algorithm. The overall results achieved show the applicability of MRH for different application services.