A two-step method for compression of medical monitoring video

Video monitoring is often conducted in hospitals. In case of prolonged monitoring, huge amounts of data are generated. There is a high demand for very efficient video compression methods. The current medical video systems utilize standard compression algorithms such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, which were designed for generic video rather than medical video. The features of this type of video such as long idle periods and small local motions, are not sufficiently addressed in these standards. As a result, current systems produce considerable redundancy in the output data. In this paper, we present a two-step method to compress medical monitoring video more efficiently. In the first step, a novel algorithm is utilized to detect the motion activities of the input video sequence. Then, the video sequence is segmented into several rectangle image regions (video object planes), which contain motion activities restricted within these windows. In the second step, the generated video object planes are compressed by an MPEG-4 module (or any module that features high compression efficiency). Our experimental results show that the two-step method improves the compression ratio significantly when compared with the existing generic MPEG algorithms while still retaining the essential video quality.