Closed-form quality measures for compressed medical images: compression noise statistics of transform coding

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical foundation for the closed-form expression of model observers on compressed images. In medical applications, model observers, especially the channelized Hotelling observer, have been successfully used to predict human observer performance and to evaluate image quality for detection tasks in various backgrounds. To use model observers, however, requires knowledge of noise statistics. This paper first identifies quantization noise as the sole distortion source in transform coding, one of the most commonly used methods for image compression. Then, it represents transform coding as a 1-D block-based matrix expression, it further derives first and second moments, and the probability density function (pdf) of the compression noise at pixel, block and image levels. The compression noise statistics depend on the transform matrix and the quantization matrix in the transform coding algorithm. Compression noise is jointly normally distributed when the dimension of the transform (the block size) is typical and the contents of image sets vary randomly. Moreover, this paper uses JPEG as a test example to verify the derived statistics. The test simulation results show that the closed-form expression of JPEG quantization and compression noise statistics correctly predicts the estimated ones from actual images.