Lossless compression of high-throughput RNAi images

The study of RNA interference (RNAi) has recently revolutionized the functional analysis of genes. The large number of images produced by the RNAi experiments requires highly efficient compression tools. In this paper we propose a new lossless compression scheme which is customized for these images. Based on the intensity distribution of the pixels they are classified into three classes. Using the classification of pixels along with the local spatial formation of pixels a context based method is proposed. Comparison of the proposed method with the existing state-of-the-art lossless compression standards and two well-known general purpose methods are performed to show the efficiency of the proposed method.