Reversible compression of medical images using decomposition and decorrelation methods

A new reversible image compression technique is presented for compressing and reconstructing various types of medical images. This technique involves a decomposition method to split the image into the most, intermediate, and the least significant bit images in order to reduce the noise effect, followed by decorrelation methods which involve differential pulse coded modulation (DPCM) and a novel interpolative technique. Three types of medical images including 60 MR, 40 CT, and 5 chest X-ray images are considered in the experiment. Depending upon the image quality and characteristics, this error-free compression technique has improved the compression efficiency by approximate 30-50% over the conventional DPCM/Huffman coding. The practical compression ratios vary from 3.2:1 to 4:1 and the true storage saving ratio reduces up to 5.35:1