Progressive medical image coding using binary wavelet transforms

In this paper, a new algorithm for progressive medical image coding is presented. An 8-bit gray scale image is divided into eight binary bit-planes, and then, binary wavelet transform is performed on each bit-plane to extract the three-level multi-resolution binary wavelet transformed images. Starting from the most significant bit-plane, each bit-plane is encoded using quadtree-based partitioning scheme to exploit the energy concentration in the high-frequency subbands. Experiments are conducted on ultrasound, MRI and CT images to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The results show a significant improvement in terms of bit-rate for the required peak signal-to-noise ratio and correlation coefficient as compared to the existing state-of-art progressive image coding methods.