Integer Wavelet Transform and Predictive Coding Technique for Lossless Medical Image Compression

Lossless image compression has one of its important application in the field of medical images. Enormous amount of data is created by the information present in the medical images either in multidimensional or multiresolution form.Efficient storage, transmission, management and retrieval of the voluminous data produced by the medical images has nowadays become increasingly complex.Solution to the complex problem lies in the lossless compression of the medical data .Medical data is compressed in such a way so that the diagnostics capabilities are not compromised or no medical information is lost.This paper proposes a hybrid technique for lossless medical image compression that combines integer wavelet transforms and predictive coding to enhance the performance of lossless compression. Here we will first apply the integer wavelet transform and then predictive coding to each subband of the image obtained as an output to lifting scheme.Measures such as entropy,scaled entropy and compression ratio are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique.