Post-Beamformer Ultrasound Compression

Embodiments of the invention compress ultrasound RF data after the receiver beamformer. An efficient compression algorithm is disclosed that incorporates the use of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and the Discrete Wavelet Packet (DWP) transform, followed by quantization of the wavelet coefficients. The algorithm first processes ultrasound scanlines from the receiver beamformer using a DCT transform. In a low-power configuration, a Hadamard transform may be used instead of the DCT. The output of the DCT processing is DCT coefficients at different frequencies. An optimized wavelet packet transform is then used for each coefficient line. The wavelet filter kernels and the wavelet packet trees can be jointly optimization using a two-step optimization algorithm.