Segmentation-based CT image compression
Arunoday Thammineni, Sudipta Mukhopadhyay, Vidya P. Kamath · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
The existing image compression standards like JPEG and JPEG 2000, compress the whole image as a single frame. This makes the system simple but inefficient. The problem is acute for applications where lossless compression is mandatory viz. medical image compression. If the spatial characteristics of the image are considered, it can give rise to a more efficient coding scheme. For example, CT reconstructed images have uniform background outside the field of view (FOV). Even the portion within the FOV can be divided as anatomically relevant and irrelevant parts. They have distinctly different statistics. Hence coding them separately will result in more efficient compression. Segmentation is done based on thresholding and shape information is stored using 8-connected differential chain code. Simple 1-D DPCM is used as the prediction scheme. The experiments show that the 1st order entropies of images fall by more than 11% when each segment is coded separately. For simplicity and speed of decoding Huffman code is chosen for entropy coding. Segment based coding will have an overhead of one table per segment but the overhead is minimal. Lossless compression of image based on segmentation resulted in reduction of bit rate by 7%-9% compared to lossless compression of whole image as a single frame by the same prediction coder. Segmentation based scheme also has the advantage of natural ROI based progressive decoding. If it is allowed to delete the diagnostically irrelevant portions, the bit budget can go down as much as 40%. This concept can be extended to other modalities.