Medical Image Compression Using Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform and Arithmetic Coding Technique

Modern medical image diagnostic are often based on X-ray, computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging technique. The raw data delivered by such imaging devices more often than not take several mega-bytes of disk space. The diagnostic images for radiology interpretation must be efficiently stored and transmitted by physician for the further medical or legal purposes. Digital medical image processing generates large and data-rich electronics files. To speed up the electronic transmission and to minimize computer storage space, medical images are often compressed into files of smaller size. Compressed medical images have to protect all the original data details when they are restored for image presentation. The paper propose the dual tree wavelet transform and arithmetic coding technique of medical image compression. The dual-tree complex wavelet transform (CWT) is a relatively recent enhancement to the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), with important additional properties, it is nearly shift invariant and directionally selective in two and higher dimensions. And arithmetic coding is a common algorithm used in both lossless and lossy data compression algorithm. It protects all the key image information needed for the storage and transmission. Image compression is required to minimize the storage space and reduction of transmission cost.