A New Lossless Compression Scheme for Medical Images by Hierarchical Segmentation

In this paper, we present a new lossless image compression scheme for medical images based on hierarc hical segmen tation (HS). HS algorithm has scalability to intensity level and adaptability to progressive transmission or displa ying. Lossless compression must have all the information of the original image. The shape and intensity of each segment must be kept completely. In the sense of compression rate, it is unrealistic to apply ordinary segmen t based schemes to lossless, because as many number of segmen ts as pixels are required to reconstruct the original image perfectly. HS can avoid this problem by a hierarc hical bitplane approach and achieve good compression rate.