A new lossy 3-D wavelet transform for high-quality compression of medical video

The authors present a new compression scheme based on applying the 3D Fast Wavelet Transform, to code medical video. This video has special features such as its representation in gray scale, the small amount of interframe variations, and the quality requirements of the reconstructed images. These characteristics as well as the social impact of desired applications deserve the design and implementation of coding schemes especially oriented to exploit its features. We analyze different parameters of the codification process, such as the utilization of different wavelet functions, the number of steps this function is applied, the way the thresholds are chosen, and the selected methods in the quantization and entropy encoder. Our coder achieves a good trade-off between compression ratio and quality of the reconstructed video. These results are better than MPEG-2, without the complexity of motion compensation.