Lossy compression of noisy cardiac image sequences
O.K. Al-Shaykh, Russell M. Mersereau · 2002
The evaluation of medical image compression algorithms differs from the evaluation of compression algorithms of other classes of images. It is more concerned with preserving the diagnostic information in the image. Moreover, cardiac SPECT images are usually corrupted by Poisson noise which severely degrades the performance of any compression algorithm. This paper presents a region-based approach to lossy compression of noisy cardiac medical images. First, noisy source coding theory is applied to this problem and the noise is filtered optimally. Afterwards, region-based quantization is applied to the image. The region of the heart and the organs are not quantized in order to preserve the diagnostic information in these images.