Reversible intraframe compression of medical images.

The performance of several reversible, intraframe compression methods is compared by applying them to angiographic and magnetic resonance (MR) images. Reversible data compression involves two consecutive steps: decorrelation and coding. The result of the decorrelation step is presented in terms of entropy. Because Huffman coding generally approximates these entropy measures within a few percent, coding has not been investigated separately. It appears that a hierarchical decorrelation method based on interpolation (HINT) outperforms all other methods considered. The compression ratio is around 3 for angiographic images of 8-9 b/pixel, but is considerably less for MR images whose noise level is substantially higher.