Radiographic image sequence coding using two-stage adaptive vector quantization

A two-stage adaptive vector quantization scheme for radiographic image sequence coding is introduced. Each frame in the sequence is first decomposed into a set of vectors, corresponding to nonoverlapping spatially contiguous block of pixels. A codebook is generated using a training set of vectors drawn from the sequence. Each vector is then encoded by the label representing the closest codeword of the codebook, and the label values in a frame label map memory at both ends of the communication channel. The changes occurring in the radiographic image sequences can be categorized into two types: those due to body motion and those due to the injected contrast dye material. In the second scheme proposed, encoding is performed in two stages. In the first stage, the labels of corresponding vectors from consecutive frames are compared and the frame label map memory is replenished (updated). This stage is sufficient to tack the changes caused by patient motions but not due to the injected contrast dye material. The resulting residual error vectors after the first stage coding are calculated for the latter changes and are further encoded by a second codebook, which is updated on a frame-to-frame basis.