Application of fixed skipped steps discrete wavelet transform in JP3D lossless compression of volumetric medical images

Abstract

In this paper, we report preliminary results of applying a step skipping to the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in lossless compression of volumetric medical images. In particular, we generalize the two-dimensional (2D) fixed variants of skipped steps DWT (SS-DWT), which earlier were found effective for certain 2D images, to a three-dimensional (3D) case and employ them in JP3D (JPEG 2000 standard extension for 3D data) compressor. For a set of medical volumetric images of modalities CT, MRI, and US, we find that, by adaptively selecting 3D fixed variants of SS-DWT, we may improve the JP3D bitrates in an extent competitive to much more complex modifications of DWT and JPEG 2000.