A Medical Image Compression Scheme Based on Low Order Linear Predictor and Most-likely Magnitude Huffman Code

In this paper, a fast lossless compression scheme is presented for the medical image. This scheme consists of two stages. In the first stage, a set of least-square-based linear prediction coefficients of each block are used to form the prediction of the current pixel. Predicted value of each pixel is subtracted from the actual value of the current pixel to form the residual image. In the second stage, an effective scheme based on the Huffman coding method is developed to encode the residual image. This newly proposed scheme could reduce the cost for the Huffman coding table while achieving high compression ratio. With this algorithm, a compression ratio higher than that of the lossless JPEG, JPEG-LS and JPEG2000 method for image can be obtained. At the same time, this method is quickest of the three compression schemes. In other words, the newly proposed algorithm provides good means for lossless medical image compression