The representation and coding of volumetric images using the 3-D derivative of Gaussian transform

Compression is essential for the efficient storage, transmission, and processing of volumetric image data. While volumetric image compression has not been pursued as actively as still image and video compression, a variety of approaches have been proposed. Many of these approaches have been inspired by existing image or video compression techniques. Local 2-D and 3-D decompositions (most notably local scale (wavelet) transforms) have proven to be particularly useful. We examine the state-of-the-art in this field, and consider a 3-D extension of a previously developed local frequency decomposition (the derivative of Gaussian transform) for the representation and coding of volumetric data.