Medical image coding based on wavelet transform and distributed

arithmetic coding
Li Wenna1, Gao Yang1,2, Yi Yufeng1, Gao Liqun1
1.School of information science and engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110004
E-mail: liwenna0810224@126.com

2. Unit 65559, PLA, Benxi, 117000

AbstractImage compression plays a crucial role in medical
imaging, allowing efficient manipulation, storage, and
transmission. Nevertheless, in medical applications the need to
conserve the diagnostic validity of the image requires the use of
lossless compression methods, producing low compression
factors. In this paper, a novel near-lossless compression scheme
is proposed here and yields significantly better compression
rates. In this proposed method, base points, direction images
and D-value images are obtained from RGB color space image
by transformation. Base points, direction images are encoded
by binary coding, distributed arithmetic coding. Wavelet
coefficients of D-value images are encoded by adaptive
Huffman coding. As a result, high over all compression rates,
better diagnostic image quality and improved performance
parameters are obtained. The algorithm is tested on
experimental medical images from different modalities and
different body districts and results are reported.

Key words: medical image coding; distributed arithmetic

coding; adaptive Huffman coding; wavelet transform
I. INTRODUCTION

mage compression is a very important aspect of image

storage and transmission. For example, image
compression has been and continues to be crucial to the
growth of multimedia computing [1, 2]. In addition, it is the
natural technology for handling the increased spatial
resolutions of today's imaging sensors and evolving
broadcast television standards. Furthermore, image
compression plays a crucial role in medical imaging,
allowing efficient manipulation, storage, and transmission.
In the last few years, there has been a considerable
increase in the volume of medical images and video
generated in hospitals. In a typical hospital, vast numbers of
medical data are generated every year. The medical
multimedia information is different from other multimedia
data because of its particular properties. There are legal and
strict regulations applied to medical multimedia
information, since the health of a patient depends on the
correctness and accuracy of this information. Moreover, the
integrity, confidentiality and security of medical data is
crucial to protect it from accidental or malicious alteration
during interchange and storage. Another critical property is
that the information related to a patient must be available in a
Manuscript received November 10, 2010.This work was supported in
part by the National Nature Science Foundation of P.R. China under Grant
60274099.

c
978-1-4244-8738-7/11/$26.00 2011
IEEE

short period of time, whenever or wherever it is required,

and especially so in the case of emergencies [3].
The compression techniques [4, 5, 6, 7] can be separated
into two classes: lossless methods and lossy methods. The
first class is composed of those methods which reconstruct
an image identical to the original; the second comprises
compression methods which lose some image details after
their application: the reconstruction is an approximation of
the original image. In the medical field in particular, the
need to conserve the diagnostic validity of the image
requires the use of lossless compression methods.
The traditional medical image compression techniques
(e.g. JPEG, JPEG2K) suffers from low compression rates,
low PSNRs, poor reconstructed image quality as well as
high MSEs and PRDs (percentage rate distortion). The
biggest challenge for the medical image compressors is to
retain the diagnostic image quality and to meet the high
compression efficiency requirements. The proposed context
based compression is an excellent method which gives better
performance with comparable computational efficiency and
the high visual quality of the reconstructed image. The
contextual coding allows selected parts of an image
(contextual region) to be coded with higher quality as
compared to the background (patient information and image
parameters). For RGB color space image, it can be
transformed into base points, direction images and D-value
images in order to decrease the color correlation. These
make them faster and less memory intensive compared to
their equivalent ones in the spatial domain without any
significant degradation of the quality of the results.
There are three stages in the proposed coding, the first
stage is color space transformation, and RGB color space
image can be transformed into base points, direction images
and D-value images. The second state are obtaining primary
color component , secondary color components and
direction images wavelet transform ,and the third stage are
directions wavelet coefficients ,base points and direction
images entropy coding. The basic objective is to achieve
better compression rates by applying different compression
thresholds for the wavelet coefficients of each DWT band
while conventional image compression methodologies.
In this paper, medical image coding with color space
transformation and wavelet transform coding are combined;
a high compression and good image quality are achieved by
applying the algorithm like adaptive Huffman coding and

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distributed arithmetic coding. This paper is organized as

follow: Section II gives the method of obtaining base points,
direction images and D-value images from RGB color space
image. Section III introduces how to obtain primary color
component, secondary color components and how to select
wavelet and wavelet base. In Section IV, Methodology for
low bit rate image coding based on color space transform,
wavelet transform, distributed arithmetic coding and
adaptive Huffman coding algorithm. In section V,
experiments are presented.
II. SELECTION CRITERION OF THE CONTEXTUAL REGION
The section begins with the introduction of the basic
theory of color correlation [8,9,10,11]. The original image
data are of high correlation between R, G, and B
components.
A. Obtaining primary color component and secondary
color components
The primary color component is selected as follows:
Primary color component=min (mean(R,G,B)) (1)
For example primary color component is G component,
the secondary color components are (R-G) and (B-G).
The pixels are found to exhibit a high degree of
correlation with its neighboring pixels, so it is easily
deduced that the occurrence of one pixel clearly increases
the likeliness of encountering a similar valued pixel in the
same neighborhood for these images.
For color component I, the pixel I(1,1) is regard as base
point of I , D-value of pixel X is

d = min( x a, x b)

(2)

And the direction is

0ifd == x a
dire =

1ifd == x b

(3)

B. Wavelets and wavelets selection

As well known, FT can obtain the whole signal spectrum,
but it can't make partial analysis to the signal. To realize
signal localization in time domain and frequency domain,
scientist Gabor put forward windowed FT in 1946. Whereas
the width of window in windowed FT is fixed, it cant meet
the needs of different width according to different
frequency. Thus mathematician put forward WT. The WT
can adopt different sampling step-size according to different
frequency, so it is very convenient and flexible. The discrete
wavelet transform [12](DWT) hierarchically decomposes an
input image into a series of successively lower resolution
images and their associated detail images. The DWT of a
digital image is implemented by a set of filters (low-pass and
high-pass filter), which are convolved with the image rows
and columns followed by down sampling by a factor of two.
The result of filtering operation is the four subbands; one
approximation (LL) and three detail subbands (LH, HL, and

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HH).LL subband corresponds to the low-frequency part of

the image, LH sub-band corresponds to the level of low-pass
vertical high-pass, reflecting the high-frequency details of
the image in the vertical direction, HL sub-band corresponds
to the level of high-pass vertical low-pass, reflecting the
high-frequency details of the image in the horizontal
direction. HH sub-band corresponds to the horizontal and
vertical high-pass, reflecting the high-frequency details of
the image in the diagonal direction. The recursive
decomposition of LL subband is based on the assumption
that the lower frequencies contain more information than the
higher frequencies.
The most effective way of two-dimensional discrete
wavelet transform to achieve is to use the Mallat algorithm.
In order to the algorithm, the low-pass and high-pass filters
are used alternately in the horizontal and vertical direction of
the image. The traditional calculation [13,14]based on
discrete wavelet transform need large quantities, high
computational complexity, high requirements for storage
space, so that it is not easy implement for hardware. The
Lifting wavelet solves this problem. As the second
generation wavelet, it does not rely on Fourier Transform,
inherits the first-generation multi-resolution characteristics,
can attain integer wavelet coefficients, neednt additional
storage space.
The choice of wavelet will affect wavelet transform
coding system design and performance. The type of wavelet
transform will directly impact on of the complexity of the
calculation and, indirectly, affect the image compression and
reconstruct the image with an acceptable error. When the
wavelet transform with a scale function, the transformation
can be achieved through a series of digital filters. In
addition, wavelet make information focus on the less
wavelet transform coefficients decides on using the wavelet
compression and reconstruction capacities.
III. DISTRIBUTED ARITHMETIC CODING
A. Arithmetic coding
let

X = [ x0 , x1 ," , xi ," , xN 1 ] be a length-N binary

symbol sequence with probabilities

p0 = p ( pi = 0) and

p1 = p ( xi = 1) and Y = [ y0 , y1 " , yi ," y N 1 ] be a side

information binary symbol sequence. The arithmetic coding
process is based on the estimation of

p0 and p1 , and the

source symbols are mapped onto sub-intervals of the [0, 1)

interval. At initialization, the current interval is set to [0, 1).
For each input symbol xi , the current interval is partitioned
into two adjacent sub-intervals whose lengths are
proportional to

p0 and p1 . The sub-interval representing

xi is selected as the next current interval, and this procedure

is repeated for the next symbol. After all N symbols have

2011 Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC)

been processed, the sequence is represented by the final

IV. METHODOLOGY FOR CODING

interval I. The codeword C X can consist in any binary

The stages in the proposed algorithm are:

1. Selected primary color component and attain secondary
color components.
2. Attain base point, direction image and D-value image
from RGB color space image.
3. D-value images are directly transformed by these
wavelet filters which based on lifting scheme.
4. The wavelet coefficients of LL, LH, HL and HH
subbands of primary color component and secondary color
components are were quantized with different steps
respectively.
5. D-value images wavelet coefficient are encoding by
adaptive Huffman coding.
6. Direction image data is encoding by distributed
arithmetic coding.
7. Base point is encoding by binary system.
The stages in the decoder are carried out in a reverse order:

number

lying

in

and

requires

approximately

log 2 I bits, where I is the length of I[15].

B. DAC encoder
DAC is based on the principle of inserting an ambiguity in
the encoding process. This is obtained using a modified
interval subdivision strategy, where the interval length is
proportional to the modified probabilities

p0 and p1 , with

p0 p0 and p1 p1 . In order to fit the enlarged

sub-intervals

p j into the [0, 1) interval, the sub-intervals

are allowed to partially overlap. The intuition is that, since

the intervals are not disjoint, the decoder will typically be
unable to decode the source unambiguously without
knowledge of the side information. As for the encoding rate,
the overlapping leads to a larger final interval, and hence a
shorter codeword [15]. In [16] a p-ary arithmetic coder has
been proposed in which the same interval can be associated
to multiple symbols, and the design of the unit interval
partition is based on the joint density of the alphabet. This
approach leads to an encoder with complex modeling stage
and a classical arithmetic decoder, whereas the DAC has a
simple encoder and a joint sequential decoder.

1. The received data is decoded .we can obtain wavelet

coefficients, direction image and base point.
2. The LL, LH, HL and HH subbands wavelet coefficients
of D-value images are inverse quantized respectively.
3. Convert direction images, base points color and D-value
images values to the primary color component and the
secondary color components.
4. Convert the primary color component and the secondary
color components to RGB color space.

Fig.1 Original test

image a

Fig.2 D-value a1 of
test image a

Fig.3 Direction a2 of
test image a

Fig.4 D-value a3 of
test image a

Fig.5 Direction a4 of
test image a

Fig.6 D-value a5 of
test image a

Fig.7 Direction a6 of
test image a

Fig.8 Compression
image of a

Fig.9 Original test

image b

Fig.10 Compression
image of b

2011 Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC)

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[8]

V. EXPERIMENTS
In this section, some experimental results to evaluate the
performance of the proposed low bit rate Image coding
based on color space transform ,wavelet transform ,
distributed arithmetic coding and adaptive Huffman coding
algorithm are presented. The used test images coded with 24
bpp. The objective image reconstruction quality is
determined by evaluating the peak signal to noise ratio
(PSNR) and MSE is given by in Eq.(4)and Eq.(5) .

(255) 2
PSNR = 10 log10
dB
MSE
w h
1
MSE =
( (i, j ) (i, j))2
( w h) i =1 j =1

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

(4)
[13]

(5)

Fig.1and fig.9 are the original test image, Fig.2, fig.4 and
fig.6 are D-value images of Fig.1, fig.3, fig.5and fig.7 are
direction images of Fig.1, fig.8 and fig.10 are the
compression images of Fig.1, and fig.9 . Their PSNR are
30.4864 and 30.6672, and compression rate are 8.67 and
9.78 respectively. For D-value images ,we have evaluated
the performance achieved by different wavelet mother
functions (Haar, Daub-4, Daub-8, Bathlet-4 and a hybrid
between Daub-4 and Daub-8), and the number of steps that
this function has been applied to, in order to find which
provides the best trade-off between quality and compression
ratio. The Daub-4 has obtained the best results. We have
developed an entropy encoder based on distributed
arithmetic coding and adaptive Huffman coding. This
entropy encoder increases the compression ratio without
affecting the medical images quality. These results are
superior to the DCT and wavelet transform techniques.
Unlike the DCT, the images dont have to be separated into
small blocks before color component transforms and effect
of block no longer exists. Generally, it can be shown that
larger images achieve a higher compression ratio.

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