Medical Image Compression Using Wrapping Based Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform and Arithmetic Coding

Abstract

Due to the development of CT (Computed Tomography), MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET (Positron Emission Tomography), EBCT (Electron Beam Computed Tomography), SMRI (Stereotactic Magnetic Resonance Imaging), etc. has enhanced the distinguishing rate and scanning rate of the imaging equipments. The diagnosis and the process of getting useful information from the image are got by processing the medical images using the wavelet technique. Wavelet transform has increased the compression rate. Increasing the compression performance by minimizing the amount of image data in the medical images is a critical task. Crucial medical information like diagnosing diseases and their treatments is obtained by modern radiology techniques. Medical Imaging (MI) process is used to acquire that information. For lossy and lossless image compression, several techniques were developed. Image edges have limitations in capturing them if we make use of the extension of 1-D wavelet transform. This is because wavelet transform cannot effectively transform straight line discontinuities, as well geographic lines in natural images cannot be reconstructed in a proper manner if 1-D transform is used. Differently oriented image textures are coded well using Curvelet Transform. The Curvelet Transform is suitable for compressing medical images, which has more curvy portions. This paper describes a method for compression of various medical images using Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform based on wrapping technique. After transformation, the coefficients are quantized using vector quantization and coded using arithmetic encoding technique. The proposed method is tested on various medical images and the result demonstrates significant improvement in performance parameters like Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Compression Ratio (CR).