European Journal of Scientific Research

ISSN 1450-216X Vol. 89 No 4 October, 2012, pp.562-567

© EuroJournals Publishing, Inc. 2012
http://www.europeanjournalofscientificresearch.com

Performance Analysis of Low Complexity Lossless

Compression Scheme for Medical Image Sequences

D. Ramkumar
Asst.Prof, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Theni Kammavar Sangam College of Technology, Theni, India
E-mail: ssrrvs@gmail.com

I. Jacob Raglend
Professor, Department of EEE
Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education
Nagercoil-629180, India

Abstract

In the Advanced medical life, a huge number of medical images are processed in
medical centers around the world. Hence it is required to have compression process on the
medical images .Even though the lossy compression techniques provide high compression;
it leads to some losses on the compressed pixels. Hence lossless medical image
compression scheme was proposed over the acquired medical images. In this paper, a new
matrix based lossless compression scheme with JPEG-LS module is proposed. This
proposed method achieves high coding gain as well as minimized time cost on the
compressed frames. 78% coding gain and 12.75 sec for the time cost was achieved using
Diamond search motion estimation Algorithm.

Keywords: JPEG-LS, Diamond search, medical images, time cost.

1. Introduction
Now a days, the medical field requires Advanced digital techniques and less equipment price. It will be
done using infrared radiation techniques which uses high sensitive Acquisition devices to capture and
process the images of the human body. This method comes under the non-invasive integrated
technology which analyze the human body in both x and y direction. Today, CT and MRI images often
good solution for the analysis of the human body in high manner. The value of radiation index is
exponential to the temperature of the human skin. For the analysis of thermal images, automated digital
image processing techniques and pattern recognition techniques are preferred for clinical evaluation.
All medical images acquired from digital cameras are stored in the form of digital. It would
require more bandwidth and high storage space. The single person would require 27 pictorial view
images from different angles of the same person. Hence it is necessary to use high definition camera
having the specifications of 620*512 pixels format. It will occupy more sizes on the digital storage
medium. Hence compression techniques are necessary to reduce the digital storage medium. The lossy
compression scheme provides high compression ratio. But the loss in the decompressed or recovered
image is high. The lossless compression scheme provides low compression ratio, but leads to less loss
in the recovered image. In this work, the compression scheme was applied on the medical images.
Performance Analysis of Low Complexity Lossless Compression
Scheme for Medical Image Sequences 563

Medical images require no loss on the recovered image. Hence the lossless medical scheme on the
medical images was proposed. In radiology field, it is required to have medical image compression due
to high mass storage and low processing system speed. The radiologist may individually require high
bandwidth and data storage that is important in clinical applications. The medical videos are larger in
size and its retrieval rate is low. Mathematical video compression is necessary. Without this technique,
the digital image processing will be high expensive and also the elapsed encoded and decoded time
cost will be more during the process.
A GSM-BM Matrix based lossless medical image compression scheme in this paper. We also
achieved optimum compression ratio and minimization of time cost.

2. Review of Related Research

The first elaborated work started in 1991.The research persons in Japan has carried out the first
analysis of CT images successfully. They obtained the acceptable compression ratio using existing
transformation techniques [5].
In 1994, Gillespy and Rowberg have introduced cosine transformation techniques in CT and
MRI medical images. They achieved 16:1 and 28:1 compression ratio with no bit loss. This technique
was useful for developing the researches in loss less medical image compression techniques.
In 1996, Nasir D. Memon and Khalid Sayood have discussed lossless compression schemes for
video sequences. A simple adaptive prediction scheme was presented that exploits temporal
correlations or spectral correlations in addition to spatial correlations. It was seen that even with
motion compensation, schemes that utilize only temporal correlations do not perform significantly
better than schemes that utilize only spectral correlations. The hybrid schemes gave significant
improvement in performance over other techniques. Besides prediction schemes, some simple error
modeling techniques that take into account prediction errors made in spectrally and/or temporally
adjacent pixels in order to efficiently encode the prediction residual.
In 2000, Marcelo et al. have presented a new low complexity loss less compression method for
the medical and satellite images. This proposed scheme in this paper was achieved the compression
ratio similar to the previous used encoding techniques. Also this method has high time cost which leads
to propagation paradigm on the compressed slices in the video.
In 2003, Dania et al. have proposed a lossless compression of video by taking into account
temporal information. It was an interesting possibility in the line of production and contribution. We
propose a compression technique which is based on motion compensation, optimal three-dimensional
(3-D) linear prediction and context based Golomb–Rice entropy coding. The proposed technique was
compared with 3-D extensions of the JPEG-LS standard for still image compression. A compression
gain of about 0.8 bit/pel with respect to static JPEG-LS, applied on a frame-by-frame basis, was
achieved at a reasonable computational complexity.
In 2006, Tsai et al. have pointed out absolutely lossless compression technique for medical
image compression, In this paper we analyze statistics associated with difference image. The main
objective of this work is to exploit some statistical measures for a difference image to compress it
losslessly. Difference image statistics plays a vital role in our technique to get maximum compression
ratios.
In 2007, Ying Li and Khalid Sayood have proposed predictive based adaptive lossless method
on the medical images. This method reduced pictorial redundancy as well as mean error on the
compressed images. This paper achieved high coding gain and compression ratio on the medical
images.
564 D. Ramkumar, and I. Jacob Raglend

3. Proposed Compression Scheme

The Proposed Approach for Lossless Medical Image Compression depends on two levels which can be
explained in the following steps.

3.1. Overview of JPEG-LS Compression

Initially the medical image which is to be compressed is applied on the JPEG-LS encoder module. The
medical video is converted in to number of frames using the medical video file size. The Encoder
module performs 8-bit coding methodology to the available frames in the medical video. The first
frame from the medical video is passed through the JPEG-LS encoder module. After this, the second
frame is passed through the same encoder module. At this stage, the second frame is called as current
slice and first frame is called as reference slice. The reference slice is stored in the internal memory
block in the encoder module. The encoder module finds the relation between the current slice and
reference slice. The estimated difference value is compared against pre-defined threshold value. If this
value lies below the given pre-defined threshold, we will set the flag as high bit and perform the
compression on the current slice. If this difference value lies over the pre-defined threshold, then we
will set the flag as low bit and find the motion vector between the current slice and reference slice. This
method can be applied on all the slices in the medical video.

3.1.1. Motion Estimation and MV

The encoders complexity of these video standards are dominated by the motion estimation, if full
search(FS) is used as the block matching algorithm(BMA).The FS matches all possible displaced
candidate blocks within the search area in the reference frame, in order to find the block with the
minimum distortion. Massive computation is, therefore, required in the implementation of FS. Many
fast BMAs is developed to alleviate the heavy computation of FS. In Our Proposed First Stage
Compression Method, the following different Motion Estimation Process, the three-step search(3SS),
the 2-D logarithmic search(LOGS), the conjugate directional search, the cross search algorithm,
varying diamond search is Implemented and Analyzed. We will implement the above mentioned
motion estimation methods and finally the best method will be recommended for lossless medical
Image Sequences based on the statistical and experimental results.

3.1.2. Motion Vectors Preprocessing

The motion vectors are derived from motion estimation process. Each motion vector consists of two
parameter coordinates. These two coordinates are individually processed which are noted as p and q. f
p is equal to ‘0’ then it is stored and sent else ‘1’ is sent. The same procedure can be applied to q
coordinate also. This method has a fixed length and easy to process for transmission and reception.

3.1.3.Technique On 9 Bit Coding

The difference value is lies between the values of -255 to 255.It has the sample value of 0 to 2p-1 and
also it may be the positive integer, so that its new value must lies in between 0 to 510.Hence we can
enable them for 9 bit JPEG lossless encoding scheme.

3.1.4. Motion Estimation Techniques

Motion estimation is used in digital image compression standard. All motion estimation process or
techniques are block based standard. The first slice from the video is dithered in to non overlapping
macro sub blocks. Each sub block may contain 8*8 pixels. This Sub block is checked against reference
sub block in the reference slice. This method of checking is called as block matching process or
scheme. By using this scheme, we can estimate sum of Absolute difference(SAD) for each sub block in
each slice. These SAD values are passed through some transformation techniques. This motion
estimation technique is also used to reduce the redundancy of the digital media. It can also used to find
Performance Analysis of Low Complexity Lossless Compression
Scheme for Medical Image Sequences 565

the best matching block in the total sub block region. It is possible to use number of block based
searching algorithms named as full search ,fast search, diamond search and 2D-log search algorithms.
These motion estimation algorithms are classified in to number of categories such as reduction
in search area, matching conditions, bandwidth availability, and time cost. Many of the motion
estimation algorithms would follow the time cost category. Also all of these motion estimation
techniques would follow minimum matching error on each sub block. Among these available
categories, Diamond and 2D-log search motion estimation techniques provides better results in terms
of time cost and mean square error.

3.2. Matrix based Lossless Compression Methodology

The Motion vectors which are obtained from first stage lossless compression technique, are further
compressed in second stage.Second Stage Compression is based on only two Matrices, binary matrix
and grayscale matrix. The main steps of the proposed algorithm are as follows:
Step 1: Acquire the medical video slice and noted as [OR].
Step 2: Develop two matrix from the matrix[OR] noted as Binary Matrix [BM] and Grayscale
Matrix [GSM] .
BM=0; if [OR]ij = [OR]i,j+1 (1)
BM=1; otherwise (2)
GSM=nul if [OR]ij = [OR]i,j+1 (3)
GSM=[OR]ij ;otherwise (4)

Figure 1: Original image pixels comparison

Step 3: Check the pixel in [OR] matrix by the previous pixel in [OR] matrix in accordance with
the procedure indicated in the figure 1.
Step 4: First element in [GSM] is set to be equal to the value of the first pixel of [OR].
Step 5: Calculate the remaining elements .
Step 6: Finally ,construct the Original image or frame using GSM and BM in accordance with
Equation 4.

4. Experimental Results
We have done our experiments by using Intel Dual core 2.4GHz processor CPU, having 2 GB internal
RAM and having the baud rate of 9600KB/s.We also used MATLAB R2010B software as a simulation
tool. The test video is captured by high definition resolution red camera with 12 MP specifications. The
video is converted in to number slices and each slice is dithered in to R,G and B components. Each
slice are 256 by 256 size and 8 bit specifications individually. The slices are applied on encoder to
generate the compression slices. These compressed slices are stored in the internal memory locations.
The Analysis on the proposed matrix based lossless compression scheme is carried out.The
result for the compression ratio and time cost for the motion estimation Algorithm is compared with
566 D. Ramkumar, and I. Jacob Raglend

the existing lossless compression techniques.The compression ratio of our proposed method is
calculated as:

Figure 2: Original CT and MRI Images

Compression Ratio (CR)= Size(file before compression)

---------------------------
Size(file after compression)

Figure 3: Reconstructed CT and MRI Images using proposed algorithm

Table.I: Performance Comparison of Lossless Compression techniques

Method Compression Ratio(CR in %)

JPEG2000 64.26
CALIC 68.56
JPEG-LS 71.34
JPEGLS+GSM+BM 78.92

Table II: Motion Estimation Encoding Time for Block window size of 4

Video Sequence type Motion Estimation Type Motion Estimation time (sec)
QCIF Diamond search 12.75
QCIF Full Search 56.18
QCIF Cross Search 37.02
QCIF 2D-log Search 32.12

Table III: Motion Estimation Encoding Time for Block window size of 8

Video Sequence type Motion Estimation Type Motion Estimation time (sec)
QCIF Diamond search 16.47
QCIF Full Search 67.98
QCIF Cross Search 42.97
QCIF 2D-log Search 36.18
Performance Analysis of Low Complexity Lossless Compression
Scheme for Medical Image Sequences 567

5. Conclusion
The proposed matrix based lossless compression method achieves the compression result about 12%
and 24%, respectively. The motion estimation time or time cost for individual slice is approximately
16.47 sec for Diamond search and 67.98 sec for full search Algorithm.
We analyzed this compression method using different motion estimation techniques. Among
the available motion existing techniques, Diamond search motion estimation scheme provides better
result in terms of elapsed time. In future, we can extend this work for Artifact affected videos and
noisy videos also. We can also reduce the time cost by modifying the motion estimation Algorithm.

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