A bitplane based algorithm for lossless compression of DNA microarray images

During the past years, the development of microarray technology has been remarkable, and it is becoming a daily tool in many genomic research laboratories. The widespread adoption of this technology, coupled with the significant volume of data generated per experiment, in the form of images, have led to significant challenges in storage and query-retrieval. In this paper, we present a lossless bitplane based method for efficient compression of microarray images. This method is based on arithmetic coding driven by image-dependent multi-bitplane finite-context models. It produces an embedded bitstream that allows progressive, lossy-to-lossless decoding. We compare the compression efficiency of the proposed method with three image compression standards (JPEG2000, JPEG-LS and JBIG) and also with the two most recent specialized methods for microarray image coding. The proposed method gives better results for all images of the test sets and confirms the effectiveness of bitplane based methods and finite-context modeling for the lossless compression of microarray images.