A new high quality image compression method for digital image sensors with Bayer color filter arrays

Digital still color video images play a very important role in the medical area. This paper presents a new image compression method with high fidelity in digital colorful image sensors with Bayer color filter arrays (CFAs). The captured CFA data is first smoothed by two low-pass filters which can be reconstructed perfectly, and then the filtered data are being compressed directly without full color interpolation. Assuring high image quality, the method can provide lower compression ratio (bit/pixel) and lower complexity than any conventional interpolation-first methods and other existing similar compression-first methods. Moreover, by adjusting the quality control factor, the image quality, PSNR9 can be changed from 46.37dB to infinity with the average compression ratio varying from 3.5bits/pixel to 6.9bits/pixeL In addition, the method provides lossless compression for the region of interest (ROI).