Reversible compression of MR images

Methods for reversible coding can be classified according to the organization of the source model as either static, semi-adaptive, or adaptive. Magnetic resonance (MR) images have different statistical characteristics in the foreground and the background and separation is thus a promising path for reversible MR image compression. A new reversible compression method, based on static source models for foreground and background separately, is presented. The method is nonuniversal and uses contextual information to exploit the fact that entropy and bit rate are reduced by increasing the statistical order of the model. This paper establishes a realistic level of expectation regarding the bit rate in reversible MR image compression, in general, and the bit rate using static modeling, in particular. The experimental results show that compression using the new method can give bit rates comparable to the best existing reversible methods.