Medical images compression with clinical diagnostic quality using logarithmic DWT

Diagnostic quality is an essential requirement in the medical images compression field to avoid misdiagnosis by radiologists. In this paper, a novel study on using the logarithm in medical images compression is presented. Two novel compression schemes are proposed to improve the image quality. The proposed compression schemes relies on discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The first approach is based on the logarithmic number system (LNS) arithmetic. The second approach (Log-DWT) is a hybrid of LNS and Linear arithmetic. Both schemes compromise between the computation speed and precision. Both approaches show a significant improvement in the image quality in addition to providing better compression rate compared to the classical approach which does not include any logarithmic operations. The structural similarity index (SSIM) was used to assess the two approaches in terms of the image quality. The performance has been evaluated for the proposed approaches and has been compared to the classical approach.