Real-time lossless compression of microarray images by separate compaction of foreground and background

Microarray technology is a powerful tool in molecular biology which is used for concurrent monitoring of a large number of gene expressions. Each microarray experiment produces hundreds of images. In this paper, we present a hardware scheme for lossless compression of 16-bit microarray images. The most significant parts of the image pixels are compressed by classifying them into foreground and background regions. This increases the spatial redundancy of the image. The foreground regions are packed together using a novel compaction unit. Real-time compression of these images is achieved while the bit-per-pixel values are comparable with the standard offline compression tools.