Enhancement of medical image compression by using threshold predicting wavelet-based algorithm

Abstract

In recent decades with the rapid development in biomedical engineering, digital medical images have been becoming increasingly important in hospitals and clinical environment. Apparently, traversing medical images between hospitals need a complicated process. Many techniques have been developed to resolve these problems. Compressing an image will reduce the amount of redundant data with the good quality of the reproduced image sufficiently high, depending on the application. In the case of medical images, it is important to reproduce the image close to the original image so that even the smallest details are readable. The aim of this paper is to propose a new compression algorithm by using the threshold values. It started by segmenting the image area into Region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Background (ROB) and use the special features provide by wavelet algorithm to produce efficient coefficients. These coefficients are then will be used as threshold value in our new proposed thresholding predicting for compression algorithm. The new compression algorithm is expected to produce a fast compression algorithm besides decreasing the image size without tolerating with the precision of image quality.