VLSI Implementation of Discrete Wavelet Transform for Lossless Compression of Medical Images

This paper presents a VLSI architecture to implement the forward and inverse two dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), to compress medical images for storage and retrieval. Lossless compression is usually required in the medical image field. The word length required for lossless compression makes too expensive the area cost of the architectures that appear in the literature. Thus, there is a clear need for designing a cost-effective architecture to implement the lossless compression of medical images using DWT. The data path word length has been selected to ensure the lossless accuracy criteria leading a high speed implementation with small chip area. The pyramid algorithm is reorganized and the algorithm locality is improved in order to obtain an efficient hardware implementation. The result is a pipelined architecture that supports single chip implementation in VLSI technology. The implementation employs only one multiplier and 352 memory elements to compute all scales what results in a considerable smaller chip area (45 mm²) than former implementations. The hardware design has been captured by means of the VHDL language and simulated on data taken from random images. Implemented in a 0.7 μm technology, it can compute both the forward and inverse DWT at a rate of 3.5 512×512 12 bit images/s corresponding to a clock speed of 33 MHz. This chip is the core of a PCI board that will speedup the DWT computation on desktop computers.