Visual fidelity of reconstructed radiographic images using wavelet transform coding and JPEG

The past few years have seen a rapid development in the areas of image compression techniques. This increase is mainly attributed to the current need for efficient storage and fast transmission of data among individuals using the information superhighway. A particular place of interest is in the area of telemedicine, where rapid transmission and effective storage leads to price reduction in medical costs. Thus, in order to achieve maximal storage and transmission parameters, the different compression algorithms should be compared in order to find an optimal technique for medical image compression. In this paper, we compare the performance of the wavelet transform to the current JPEG standard. We performed our comparisons on radiographic images and used criteria such as visual quality, peak signal-to-noise ratio and mean square error, in order to judge the compression capabilities of both techniques. Wavelet reconstructed images outperformed JPEG reconstruction in all the above criteria