VQ index coding for high-fidelity medical image compression

In order to obtain the high-fidelity medical compressed images, a new compression scheme is proposed. Based on the stringent requirements on lossy medical image compression, we refine the context modeling for a given class of medical images and utilize the conditional entropy coding of the VQ index (CECOVI) scheme to code the MR head images. The experimental results show that the image-type-dependent CECOVI can achieve better rate-distortion performance than the state-of-art wavelet image coder SPIHT. This also implies that incorporating the conditional entropy coding strategy into the VQ process is an appropriate way for high-fidelity medical image compression.