Towards a mobile implementation of waaves for certified medical image compression in E-health applications

Abstract

In this article, we present two studies that pave the way towards a mobile implementation of the WAAVES certified medical image compression encoder. On the algorithmic side, we compared three techniques to increase the compression rate. The obtained results show a significant bit-rate reduction, around 40% with respect to the WAAVES encoder, while keeping the same visual quality. On the architectural side, we describe the HW/SW co-design of an architecture implemented in a FPGA platform. By using code profiling, critical portions of the code were identified, then two methods for hardware acceleration were used to implement the critical part of the coder. The tests were done on a StratixIVGX230 FPGA and the results showed that HW/SW co-design could achieve up to 20x performance gain in the critical portion. The combination of these results demonstrates the feasibility of a mobile implementation of the WAAVES certified medical image coder suitable for e-health applications. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2013.