A near lossless three-dimensional medical image compression technique using 3D-discrete wavelet transform

Abstract

In the field of medical image processing, there are several imaging modalities that emerged and produced high quality of images that imposes to greater amount of storage space as well as bandwidth for transmission. Therefore, there is always a great need to develop compression techniques on such images. Moreover, they produce three-dimensional images by sequence of 2D slices and process each as like 2D image. Therefore, it is essential that every medical image processing operation needs to converge on 3D space (three-dimensional image). In this paper, we provide the wavelet-based image compression technique that can be directly applied on the 3D images itself. We apply 3D DWT on a 3D volume and the resultant coefficients are taken to further compression process (like thresholding, entropy encoding). The inverse processes are performed for decompression to reconstruct the images. The effects of the results based on different wavelets are assessed and the results of lossy mode are compared in terms to lossless mode.