Progressive transmission of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis image based on context features and bit-plane method

Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis image has nowadays become one of the important tools for biologists on protein researches. In this era of highly developed Internet technology, while considering image size and bandwidth, how to transmit the most important information for the least amount of transmission time as well as the smallest data size is one important topic. Biologists want to quickly decide whether that is the image they want or not. Hence, we consider using progressive image transmission method to achieve this goal. For two-dimensional gel electrophoresis images´ characteristics, we know that proteins in images are the most important information. In terms of visual effect, if using bit-plane method or JPEG progressive compression model, they cannot clearly express protein spots after several phases of the transmission. Therefore, our paper provides, based on context features, a lossless compressed progressive image transmission method to satisfy the requirements. From what our experimental results show, our method allows to see the location, size and color of protein spots clearly through first several phases.