New high-fidelity medical image compression based on modified set partitioning in hierarchical trees

Medical images must be compressed before transmission due to bandwidth and storage limitations. The set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm is an efficient method for lossy and lossless coding of medical images. We propose some modifications to the SPIHT algorithm. It is based on the idea of the insignificant correlation of wavelet coefficients among medium- and high-frequency subbands. In this scheme, insignificant wavelet coefficients that correspond to the same spatial location in the medium subbands can be used to reduce the redundancy by a combined function proposed in associated with the modified SPIHT. In high-frequency subbands, the modified SPIHT proposes a dictator to reduce the interband redundancy. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique improves the quality of the reconstructed medical image in terms of both the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the perceptual results over JPEG2000 and the original SPIHT at the same bit rate. (C) 2003 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.