Lossless Compression Method for Medical Image Sequences Using Super-Spatial Structure Prediction and Inter-frame Coding

Abstract

Space research organizations, hospitals and military air surveillance activities, among others, produce a huge amount of data in the form of images hence a large storage space is required to record this information. In hospitals, data produced during medical examination is in the form of a sequence of images and are very much correlated; because these images have great importance, some kind of lossless image compression technique is needed. Moreover, these images are often required to be transmitted over the network. Since the availability of storage and bandwidth is limited, a compression technique is required to reduce the number of bits to store these images and take less time to transmit them over the network. For this purpose, there are many state-of the-art lossless image compression algorithms like CALIC, LOCO-I, JPEG-LS, JPEG20000; Nevertheless, these compression algorithms take only a single file to compress and cannot exploit the correlation among the sequence frames of MRI or CE images. To exploit the correlation, a new algorithm is proposed in this paper. The primary goals of the proposed compression method are to minimize the memory resource during storage of compressed data as well as minimize the bandwidth requirement during transmission of compressed data. For achieving these goals, the proposed compression method combines the single image compression technique called super spatial structure prediction with inter-frame coding to acquire grater compression ratio. An efficient compression method requires elimination of redundancy of data during compression; therefore, for elimination of redundancy of data, initially, the super spatial structure prediction algorithm is applied with the fast block matching approach and later Huffman coding is applied for reducing the number of bits required for transmitting and storing single pixel value. Also, to speed up the block-matching process during motion estimation, the proposed method compares those blocks that have identical sum and leave the others; therefore, the time taken by the block-matching process is reduced by minimizing the unnecessary overhead during the blockmatching process. Thus, in the proposed fast lossless compression method for medical image sequences, the twostage redundant data elimination process ultimately reduces the memory resource required for storing and transmission. The method is tested on the sequences of MRI and CE images and produces an improved compression rate.