Lossless Compression of Microarray Images by Run Length Coding

Microarray image technology is a powerful tool for monitoring thousands of genes simultaneously. The size of microarray images is very large; hence efficient compression routines that take advantage of the way in which spots are represented in a microarray image are required. This paper discusses a lossless image compression technique that aims to minimize the number of pixels to be stored, to represent a spot. Every row in each spot is represented by a single coded value and also the number of coded data in columns is further reduced. Image is processed in such a way that it does not require addressing and spot segmentation. The compressed data is then used to reconstruct the microarray. The results of the implementation of this method are compared with other lossless image compression methods. This method requires least number of bytes, as less as approximately 56kB when applied to a microarray image of size 657kB.