Employing New Hybrid Adaptive Wavelet-Based Transform and Histogram Packing to Improve JP3D Compression of Volumetric Medical Images

The primary purpose of the reported research was to improve the discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-based JP3D compression of volumetric medical images by applying new methods that were only previously used in the compression of two-dimensional (2D) images. Namely, we applied reversible denoising and lifting steps with step skipping to three-dimensional (3D)-DWT and constructed a hybrid transform that combined 3D-DWT with prediction. We evaluated these methods using a test-set containing images of modalities: Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Ultrasound (US). They proved effective for 3D data resulting in over two times greater compression ratio improvements than competitive methods. While employing fast entropy estimation of JP3D compression ratio to reduce the cost of image-adaptive parameter selection for the new methods, we found that some MRI images had sparse histograms of intensity levels. We applied the classical histogram packing (HP) and found that, on average, it resulted in greater ratio improvements than the new sophisticated methods and that it could be combined with these new methods to further improve ratios. Finally, we proposed a few practical compression schemes that exploited HP, entropy estimation, and the new methods; on average, they improved the compression ratio by up to about 6.5% at an acceptable cost.