Lossless progressive compression of medical images

ABSTRACT This paper presents a lossless image compression method, which provides progressive transmission property andscalability. The proposed method enables the codec to have a asymmetric structure by employng a fast adaptivesubband decomposition and the optimization of the quantization parameter during arithmetic coding. This methodprovides a higher compression ratio than JPEG lossless mode. Keywords: lossless compression, progressive transmission, fast adaptive subband decomposition, conditioning con- text, optimization of quantization parameter 1. INTRODUCTION Image compression method can be classified into two different methods: lossy compression and lossless compression. In general, the lossless compression is required in applications such as medical imaging or satellite photography,where the reliability of reproduction of images is a critical factor. Two features which are most required to imagecompression, either lossy or lossless, would be (i) scalability and (ii) progressive transmission property, since (i)enables receivers with different resolutions to display a received picture without any postprocessing at the receiverand (ii) allows many multimedia services such as image browsing. Considering the utilization of still images, the