An Empirical Selection of Wavelet for Near-lossless Medical Image Compression

Wavelets are defined as mathematical functions that segment the data into different frequency levels. We can easily capture the fine and coarse details of an image or signal referred to as a subband. And it also helps in subband thresholding to achieve good compression performance. In recent days in telemedicine services, the handling of medical images is prominently increasing and it leads to the demand for medical image compression. While compressing the medical images, we have to concentrate on the data that holds important information, and at the same time, it must retain the image quality. Near-Lossless compression plays an essential role to achieve a better compression ratio than lossy compression and provides better quality than lossless compression. In this paper, we analyzed the sub-banding of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) using different types of wavelets and made an optimal selection of wavelets for subband thresholding to attain a good compression performance with an application to medical images. We used Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) compression scheme to test the compression performance of different wavelets. The Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Bits Per Pixel (BPP), Compression Ratio, and percentage of number of zeros are used as metrics to assess the performance of all the selected wavelets. And to find out its efficiency in possessing the essential information of medical images, the subband of the selected wavelets is further utilized to devise the near-lossless compression scheme for medical images.