Effective image segmentation using Particle Swarm Optimization for image compression in multi application smart cards

Multi application smart cards can replace various cards including driving license, health insurance card, national identity card, access card into one single card. Advantages of multi application smart cards include ease in carrying a single card instead of multiple cards, ease of use among other advantages. With its limited memory size, storage of data efficiently plays an important role. A major challenge faced in multi application smart card is the storage of various images including fingerprint, personal identity photo and medical images. Lossless image compression techniques may not fully satisfy the space constraints faced in multi application smart cards, whereas lossy medical image compression cannot be applied satisfactorily across all the images stored in the card. Segmentation techniques to identify Non Region of Interest (NROI) and Region of Interest (ROI) can improve the compression rate by lossy compression for the NROI area and lossless compression for ROI area. In this paper it is proposed to implement an extension of the active contour segmentation model using the proposed Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to optimize the segmentation. The ROI obtained through the proposed segmentation is compressed using lossless compression and the NROI is compressed using lossy compression.