A new scheme for joint ultrasound image-ECG signal compression

We introduce in this paper, a new hybrid compression scheme of ultrasound images and ECG signals. This approach consists in introducing the ECG signals in the black background regions of the image. The mixture of data (image and ECG) is thus compressed by only one coder (in our case, by JPEG2000), without having to use two distinct coders, usually used in this kind of applications. As ECG signals have a particular importance in the resulting image, we will use in a second time the region of interest coding (ROI) technique to code the region where they were inserted. Finally, the reconstruction quality is evaluated using the PSNR (peak signal noise ratio) and the PRD (percent root mean square difference), respectively for both the ultrasound image and the ECG signals.