Medical Image Compression Approach Based on Image Resizing, Digital Watermarking and Lossless Compression

The computerization of images have been important for different medical applications. Nevertheless, the huge volume of medical images can rapidly saturate transmission especially in telemedicine field and may encumber storage systems in case of local saving. Data compression represents the most used solution to deal with this problem. Indeed, it can minimize the data space and may reduce both the time of data transfer and bandwidth consumption. In this context, we have proposed new approaches, which combined image reduction and expansion techniques, digital watermarking and lossless compression standards such as JPEG-LS (JLS) and TIFF formats. We named these compression methods wREPro.TIFF (watermarked Reduction/Expansion Protocol combined with TIFF format) and wREPro.JLS (wREPro combined with JPEG-LS format). The results of comparative experiments show that we have provided significant improvements over the well-known JPEG image compression standard. Indeed, our proposed compression algorithms have ensured a better preservation of the image quality notably for high compression ratios.