Lossless compression of radiographic images of aircraft components

This paper presents an efficient lossless compression method to reduce the storage requirement and transmission time for radiographic non‐destructive testing images of aircraft components. The method is based on a combination of predictive coding and the integer wavelet transform. By using the component CAD model to divide the radiographic image of aircraft components into different regions with each region having the same material structure, the parameters of the predictors and the choice of the integer wavelet transform are optimised according to the specific image features contained in each region. Using a real radiographic image of a practical aircraft component as an example, the proposed method is presented and shown to offer a significantly higher compression ratio than other lossless compression schemes currently available.