Block-based wavelet transform coding of mammograms with region-adaptive quantization

To achieve both high compression ratio and information preserving, it is an efficient way to combine segmentation and lossy compression scheme. Microcalcification in mammogram is one of the most significant sign of early stage of breast cancer. Therefore in coding, detection and segmentation of microcalcification enable us to preserve it well by allocating more bits to it than to other regions. Segmentation of microcalcification is performed both in spatial domain and in wavelet transform domain. Peak error controllable quantization step, which is off-line designed, is suitable for medical image compression. For region-adaptive quantization, block- based wavelet transform coding is adopted and different peak- error-constrained quantizers are applied to blocks according to the segmentation result. In view of preservation of microcalcification, the proposed coding scheme shows better performance than JPEG.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.