An Image Compression Algorithm for Wireless
Endoscopy and Its ASIC Implementation
Yingke Gu1,3, Hanjun Jiang1*, Xiang Xie1, Guolin Li2 and Zhihua Wang1
1
Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2
Department of electronics engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
3
Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal & Communication Group Co., Ltd., Beijing, China
*
Email: jianghanjun@tsinghua.edu.cn
Abstract—This paper proposes an image compression
algorithm for wireless capsule endoscopy with high compression
rate, low computation complexity and high quality. By analyzing
the WCE images properties, the algorithm proposes a color space
transform to de-correlate the R-G1-G2-B color components in
the Bayer pattern image. Then a 4×4 integer Discrete Cosine
Transformation is adopted to reduce the spatial redundancy in
the image with the consideration of its low complexity. For
increasing compression rate furthermore, run-length encoding on
four adjacent blocks is proposed. The compression rate and peak
signal-to-noise of the image compression algorithm are 93.6%
and 40.9dB respectively. Its corresponding pipeline hardware
architecture with distributed storage is also proposed for
minimizing the memory size and reducing power consumption.
The ASIC design of the compressor has been implemented in a
0.18 μm CMOS process, whose area is 1.5mm×2.0mm and
power consumption is 1.03mW at 2 fps with 480×480 resolution.
Keywords—WCE; image compression; ASIC
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a state-of-art
technology in the development of the medical diagnostics [1].
It first allows painless optical imaging of the whole small
bowel. Due to its intrinsic limitations, the WCE still has some
drawbacks, such as low image acquisition rate and short
battery life. In order to reduce the power consumption and
solve the wireless communication bandwidth bottleneck, the
image compression plays a key role in WCE [2] [3].
For obtaining high quality reconstructed images, some
lossless (near-lossless) compression algorithms have been
implemented in the wireless endoscopic capsule. Among
many image compression standards, JPEG-LS can be a good
choice for WCE application, because it can work with pixels
coming in progressive scanning fashion. In [2] and [3], design
of image compressors based on JPEG-LS algorithm have been
described, a low-pass filter has been applied for improving the
compression rate. Another algorithm is developed in [4] that
consists of a differential pulse coded modulation (DPCM)
followed by Golomb–Rice encoding. Several subsampling
schemes on the chrominance components are also applied
based on the nature of endoscopic images. The above image
compression algorithms have low computation complexity.
However, the compression rates of the algorithms are
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relatively low, which are less than 81%.
For improving the compression rate as well as assuring high
quality, some works based on discrete cosine transformation
(DCT) have been introduced in [5]– [10]. Those compression
algorithms get higher compression rate due to the high energy
compaction capability of DCT. However, the high
computational complexity of DCT, including multiplications,
additions, data scheduling and data buffering, results in high
hardware cost and high power consumption.
This paper proposes a novel compression algorithm for the
Bayer pattern WCE images. Compared with the above image
compression methods, the proposed image compression has
the highest compression rate as well as relatively low
computational complexity. The corresponding hardware
implementation is also discussed in this paper. A pipeline
architecture with the distributed memory is proposed for
minimizing the memory area and reducing the power
consumption.
II. IMAGE COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS
A. Overview of the proposed algorithm
Wireless capsule endoscopy images have two properties
that can be exploited for the efficient image compression. The
first one is that the color information of the WCE images is
more monotonous than the natural images. The second one is
that the WCE images are much smoother in the spatial domain.
According to the WCE images properties, an image
compression algorithm with high compression rate, low
computation complexity and high quality is proposed for the
Bayer pattern WCE images. The proposed algorithm scheme
consists of color components de-correlation, block
transformation, quantization and entropy encoding. The
following parts will discuss the algorithm in detail.
B. Color components de-correlation
The compression method proposed in this paper aims at the
Bayer pattern WCE images. As shown in Fig.1, four color
components are defined for the Bayer pattern images, including
Red (R), Green1 (G1), Green2 (G2) and Blue (B). Green
components are divided into two parts for the symmetry
consideration. The color components of the Bayer pattern
image, R-G1-G2-B, are still highly correlated. For efficient
compression, the color components should be de-correlated.
103
 quantization tables below are acquired under this PSNR
Y  R 
    constraint [12].
 D 1  K G 1  32 64 128 128   64 64 128 128 
 D 2 G 2  64
   
 64 128 256 5 12  256 256 5 12 
E  B  QY   Q D1  
128 256 512 512  128 256 512 512 
…
…
…
…

…
…
…
…
   
128 5 12 512 5 12  128 5 12 512 5 12 
Fig.1 Color components de-correlation
 64 128 128 256   64 128 256 256 
The de-correlation process can be expressed as a matrix 128 128 5 12 
256 256 5 12  256 512
transformation. As shown in Fig.1, four adjacent color QD 2  QE  
128 256 512 512   256 512 512 512 
components can be seemed as a vector. A new vector is    
 256 5 12 512 5 12   256 5 12 512 5 12 
formed after the transformation. The process also can be
represented by mathematical expression shown in Fig.1. The D. Entropy Encoding
Bayer pattern image is rearranged to be a new matrix with four The next important step is to find a suitable and efficient
rows. Each row represents a color component. After a 4×4 variable-length encoding scheme. The objective is to produce
de-correlation matrix K acting on it, another matrix is as fewer bits as possible. In order to improve the encoding
generated and the components in it have very weak correlation. efficiency, run-length encoding and Huffman encoding are
The new components are defined as Y, D1, D2 and E. Hence, applied, like in the JPEG standard.
finding a matrix K with good de-correlation property and low The DC coefficients of adjacent 4×4 blocks of same color
computation complexity is quite important. component are strongly correlated. They often contain a
Suppose that the matrix KL is the K-L transform matrix for significant fraction of the total image energy also. Therefore,
de-correlating the color components of the Bayer pattern they are coded differentially [13].
image. It is found that the result of KL has convergence when The remaining AC coefficients are run-length encoded. For
increasing sample size. The reason for it is that most of the improving the encoding efficiency, the run-length encoding
WCE images are similar with each other, especially their color should be applied for multiple blocks. The AC coefficients of
components distribution. For computation feasibility, we set the adjacent color components Y-D1-D2-E, are combined
the sample size as one frame of image. And then the average together for the run-length encoding. Y^, D1^, D2^ and E^
of K-L transform matrices for about 200 different images is represent the 4 × 4 blocks after block transformation and
used as the de-correlation transform matrix, as shown in (1). quantization. The run-length encoding orders the highest-
For reducing computation complexity, integer approximation energy coefficients first, maximizing the number of
is used, and the de-correlation matrix K is shown in (2). consecutive zero-valued coefficients appearing in the scan to
 0 . 523 0 . 598 0 . 522 0 . 487 
(1) reduce the total encoding length. And zig-zag order is used in
 0 . 653 0 . 012 
0 . 007 - 0 . 762 
KL   one block [13]. After the former color space transform, the
 - 0 . 511 0 . 534 0 . 572 - 0 . 611 
  new color component Y occupies the most energy, followed
 0 . 011 0 . 712 - 0 . 732 0 . 001 
by D1, D2 and E in order. Following this principle, the AC
1 1 1 1  (2) coefficients in the four blocks are scanned in the fashion
1 0 0  1
K   shown in Fig.2. The number in the bracket represents its order.
 1 1 1  1
 
0 1 1 0  Next, they are encoded in a 2-step process [13]. In the first
step sequence of quantized coefficients is converted into an
C. Block transformation and quantization intermediate sequence of symbols (L, v), where L is the
For improving the compression rate, we choose block number of consecutive zero-valued AC coefficients in the
transformation based method to remove the spatial redundancy above sequence order preceding the nonzero AC coefficient v.
of the WCE images. To reduce the computation complexity In the second step Huffman encoding variable-length codes
and buffer memory of the proposed algorithm, a 4×4 integer are assigned to the symbols (L, v).
DCT [11] matrix T is used as shown in (3).
1 1 1 1 
2 1 -1 - 2 
(3)
T 
1 -1 -1 1 
 
1 -2 2 -1
Based on the features of human visual system, quantization
is applied after the block transformation for getting a high
compression rate. The quantization table for Y-D1-D2-E will
have 64 parameters. The elements of the quantization table are
set to 2n to eliminate the division operations as follows. By
experimenting with different WCE images, we find that the
Fig.2 Combined Run-length Encoding order
there is no visual difference between the reconstructed image
and the original image, when PSNR is more than 40dB. The

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 III. ASIC IMPLEMENTATION
Fig.3 shows the overall block diagram of the proposed
image compressor. The image compressor consists of data
path and controller. The data path is pipelined and is
composed of color de-correlation module, block transform
module and encoder module. The controller is implemented by
several finite-state machines generating control signals to all
the components in the data path.
As shown in Fig.3, the color de-correlation module and
block transform module are both composed of data buffer and
matrix transform unit. For minimizing the memory area and
reducing power consumption, distributed memory architecture
and dedicated operation sequence are proposed. In the encoder
module, divided Huffman table storage architecture is applied
for reducing power consumption in this stage.
Fig.3 Proposed image compressor block diagram
The color de-correlation module contains input buffer and
color transform unit. The input buffer consists of two random
access memories (RAM), as shown in Fig.4. For color de-
correlation, the RAMs can store one row of Bayer image data.
The color transform unit is designed according to the data
flow diagram also shown in Fig.4. It consists of adders,
subtractors and it is pipelined.
Fig.4 Color De-correlation module
The memory in Block Transform module is used for
buffering the progressive image data to the block
transformation. At the top level, this block transform module
consists of four block transform sub-modules for the four
color components Y-D1-D2-E, respectively, as shown in Fig.3.
Each sub-module consists of buffer memory, 2-D DCT unit
and quantization unit. The distributed memory structure is also
applied in the sub-module level. As shown in Fig.5, the buffer
memory used is divided into three parts. Each part is used for
storing the color components in one row.
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Fig.5 Block transform sub-module
The 2-D DCT operation is achieved by pipelining the two
1-D DCT modules as shown in Fig.5. The transpose buffer
which converts row operations to column operations also
functions as the desired pipelining registers. Quantization
operation is performed right after the DCT operation. By
algorithm optimization, quantization can be performed by shift
operation.
The quantized data are then sent to the entropy encoder for
encoding. The DC coefficient is encoded in a manner
described earlier through differential encoding and Huffman
encoding. The arranged AC coefficients are sent to the run-
length encoder firstly. According to the run-length encoding
algorithm, the AC run-length encoder mainly consists of zero
detector and zero counter.
The run-length code is then sent to the Huffman encoder.
Each Huffman encoding process can be seemed as a memory
read operation. The run-length code is set as the address of the
Huffman table memory. The power consumption of the read
operation is mainly determined by the memory size. A divided
Huffman table memory architecture is proposed for power
reduction. The store architecture is shown in Fig.6. It consists
of two memories, one small memory Memory-H and one large
memory Memory-L. As we know, the short Huffman code has
high occurrence frequency. So the short Huffman codes are
stored in the small memory and the rest Huffman codes are
stored in the large memory.
Fig.6 Encoder module architecture
IV. IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS
In order to evaluate the proposed compression algorithm,
the algorithm is applied for WCE images with different
patterns. Compression rate (CR) and peak signal noise ratio
(PSNR) are computed for all the images. The average CR and
PSNR are 93.6% and 40.9dB, respectively.
The original WCE images and reconstructed images with
different patterns are shown in Fig.7. There is almost no visual
difference between the original images and reconstructed
images.
The proposed image compression algorithm is implemented
105
 in a 0.18μm CMOS technology. It is integrated into a SoC
chip which has been applied in a wireless endoscopic capsule.
Fig.8 shows the layout of the proposed image compressor
inside the SoC chip. It occupies about 1.5mm×2.0mm area.
Its chief performance has been shown in Table 1.
Fig.7 Original images and reconstructed images
V. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes an image compression algorithm for
Bayer pattern WCE images. Considering the WCE images
properties and apply environment, this algorithm consists of
color de-correlation, 4 × 4 integer DCT, quantization and
entropy encoding. For improving compression rate, combined
run-length encoding and optimized Huffman encoding are
proposed. An ASIC implementation of the proposed algorithm
is also proposed in this paper. In order to minimize the
memory area and reduce power consumption, distributed
memory architecture is applied. A divided Huffman table
memory architecture is proposed for reducing power
consumption furthermore. The compression rate and peak
signal-to-noise of the image compression algorithm are 93.6%
and 40.9dB respectively. The image compressor ASIC
occupies 1.5mm×2.0mm. Its power consumption is 1.03mW
at 2fps with 480×480 image resolution.

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