Integrated lossy, near-lossless, and lossless compression of medical volumetric data

Abstract

We propose an integrated, wavelet based, two-stage coding scheme for lossy, near-lossless and lossless compression of medical volumetric data. The method presented determines the bit-rate while encoding for the lossy layer and without any iteration. It is in the spirit of "lossy plus residual coding" and consists of a wavelet-based lossy layer followed by an arithmetic coding of the quantized residual to guarantee a given pixel-wise maximum error bound. We focus on the selection of the optimum bit rate for the lossy coder to achieve the minimum total (lossy plus residual) bit rate in the near-lossless and the lossless cases. We propose a simple and practical method to estimate online the optimal bit rate and provide a theoretical justification for it. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides improved, embedded lossy, and lossless performance competitive with the best results published so far in the literature, with an added feature of near-lossless coding.