Novel Methods for Near Lossless Compression for Medical Images

The rapid and remarkable developments in information, communication and imaging technologies has invariably revolutionized several fields like Health Care, Agriculture, Business, Education, Entertainment, Law Enforcement and Remote Sensing, etc. This has resulted in the accumulation of massive volumes of digital data (specifically digital images), eventually increasing the need for image processing applications. Image processing applications coupled with advancements in internet technology, demands massive data storage and transmission. Effective compression of digital images is the key towards reducing the transmission bandwidth and storage requirements and further helps us to deliver data in a compact form. Compression Algorithms are developed focusing on the following three important factors that are vital for effective transmission and storage of data: Image Quality, Compression Efficiency and Low Computation Complexity. The greatest challenge faced by the developers of image compression algorithms is that they should achieve a balance between these factors. Developers must trade-off one factor to achieve another.