Color compression and spectral analysis of biological images

Optical microscopy plays a key role in the biological sciences. Color images, as seen through the microscope and as subsequently digitized for computer analysis, respresent basic data for qualitative and quantitative interpretation. We have developed a new compression algorithm for such images that can achieve a 2- to 8-fold increase in compression of the color information as a preprocessing step to further well-known image compression schemes. At the same time, the picture is optimally preprocessed for optical spectral analysis. This technique has been found to be very useful in cell biology when applied to stained specimens. Even with these large compression ratios, little significant information is lost.