2010 3rd International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP2010)

A Pseudo Lossless Image Compression Method

Tzong-Jer Chen Department of Medical Imaging and Radiology, ShuZen College of Medicine and Management, Luju Shiang, Kaohsiung, 82144 Taiwan. Keh-Shih Chuang Department of Biomedical Engineering and Environmental Science, National Tsing-Hua University, Hsinchu, 30043 Taiwan.

AbstractTo present a pseudo lossless compression which modifies the noise component of the bit data to enhance the compression without affecting image quality? The hypothesis behind the study is that the bit data contaminated by noise can be manipulated without affecting image quality. The compression method comprises of three steps: (1) to estimate the noise level for each pixel, (2) to identify those bits contaminated by noise and replace them with zero, (3) to perform a lossless data compression on the processed image. The compression ratios are 3.10, 5.24, and 6.60 for CT, MRI, and digitized mammograms respectively, for the new method which shows a 36.8%, 62.7%, and 125% increase for the three data sets than original data. The processed images are evaluated by two image enhancing techniques: window/level and zoom. They are indistinguishable from original images. The proposed method demonstrates an improvement more than 40% in compression ratio than original image without deterioration in image quality. The qualities of processed images are the same as compared with those images by loosy JPEG2000 image compression at compression ratio around 10. Keywords-image quality; image compression; image JPEG2000. noise;

achieve a maximum compression ratio of about 2.5, but will allow exact recovery of the original image from the compressed version. This compression ratio is limited by the noise in the image which degrades the correlation between pixels [5].An irreversible scheme will not allow exact recovery after compression but can achieve much more compression ratio. More compression is obtained at the expense of image quality. The compression ratio for an irreversible technique can be as high as 25 for projectional chest radiographs without noticeable loss of image quality [4]. Halpern et al. [6] used a quadtree-based data compression algorithm to provide different levels of compression within and outside of regions of interest (ROIs). They concluded that at any given compression ratio, diagnostic sensitivity was greater with ROI compression than with uniform quadtree compression. Today, lossy compression methods are not being used by radiologists in primary diagnoses because radiologists are concerned with the legal consequences of incorrect diagnosis based on a lossy compressed image. However, large-scale clinical tests are under way by several research laboratories to develop reasonable policies and acceptable standards for the use of lossy processing on medical images [1]. The term visually loseless has been used to characterize lossy scheme that result in no visual loss under normal viewing conditions [7, 8]. A related term called information preserving is suggested by the American College of Radiology and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (ACR-NEMA). A compression is defined as information preserving if the resulting image retains all the significant information of the original image. Both visually loseless and information preserving are subjective terms and extreme caution should be taken for their interpretation. Chan et al. [9] showed that, the detection accuracy was independent of pixel depth for discarded up to three LSB planes from a digitized mammography with 12 bits depth. Stewart et al. [10] suggested that 5-6 least significant bits (LSBs) are spectrally white in an image by applying the power spectrum method to verify each bit plane in a magnetic resonance (MR) image. They concluded that the gray level dynamic range of a MR image spanned only six or seven bits at most. Chan et al.9 showed also that, the detection accuracy was independent of pixel depth for discarded up to three LSB planes from a digitized mammography with 12 bits depth.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Recent technological advances have made digital radiology a practical alternative to the film-based system [1]. The fast retrieval and ease of transmission of digital data makes this alternative particularly attractive. The essential idea behind digital radiology is the flow of image information, i.e. retrieval, communication, display, and archiving of the image data. Both the speed of data transmission and the space storage requirements depend on the amount of data. The data generated by imaging devices of all digital radiological modalities are massive. Medical imaging data is also increasing with the latest high-resolution imaging equipment. The PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) is used to manage and store the large number of images. Large amounts of data may affect the performance of PACS systems. Data compression techniques substantially reduce the volume of the image data generated and thus increase the efficiency of the information flow.1 Data compression methods can be reversible (error-free) or irreversible (lossy) [2-4]. A reversible scheme can only

978-1-4244-6516-3/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

610

Recently, Chen et al. [11] estimated image spatial information using the Moran Z value in the pixels and applied the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test to determine the existing discrepancies between the original and LSB discarded images. Their results showed that, on average the discrepancy from the original image by discarding 1-2 bits in T1 and CR images or 2-3 bits in T2 and body CT images are non-differentiation statistically. Olsen [12] estimated the standard deviation for Gaussian and uniform distributed white additive noise in images. He found that, the use of standard deviation to estimate noise in the residual images was most reliable. The residual image was obtained by subtracting the pre-filtered image from the original image, which smoothed image is obtained by average or median filters. Chuang et al. [13, 14] reported that, 8-9 information bits exists in medical images and 4-5 bits contains only noise. Discarding these noisy bits would not visually deteriorate image quality, as indicated in their study. However, the true effect on the image has not been verified. In this study, we propose a new image compression technique called pseudo error-free compression. The technique comprises three steps: (1) estimating the noise level of each pixel, (2) identifying the noise bits and modify them, and (3) compressing the image reversibly. The idea behind this method is that we can modify the noise bits in the image without affecting the quality and yield better compression ratio. Since only noise data are manipulated, the information is preserved in the processed image. That is why we claim the compression is "pseudo lossless" instead of "visually lossless". The advantage of this new technique is that the compression ratio is higher than reversible compression method and the image quality is not affected. To check the effect of noisebits removal on image quality, several image enhancement techniques are performed to compare the original and denoised (noise zeroed) images. In this study, the qualities of processed images have the same PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) results as compared with those images by loosy JPEG2000 image compression at compression ratio 10. II. MATERIALS AND METHODS

and replace them with zero to increase the compression ratio. Figure. 1 illustrates the flow chart of this method. A. Images For this study we randomly chose 19 body images from computerized tomography (CT), 19 brain images from magnetic resonance (MR) and 19 mammograms. Both CT and MR data sets were from a serial 3D study. The CT images were from a GE 9800 scanner with an image size of 512512 and 12 bits deep. The MR images were from a GE Signa 1.5 T scanner with a size of 512512. The mammographic images were digitized from film at a size of 20482048 with an Eikonix 1412 12 bits CCD camera. We cropped the images to 10241024 for better storage.

Original Signal median Img (33 window) Img

Subtraction Residual Img Standard Deviation (55 window) Noise Level

Despite the advance of instrumentation, noise exists in medical image. The sources of noise are different for each digital modality. Noise in CT and radiography is due to the Poisson statistics of x ray photons, to beam hardening, and to Compton scattering. Noise in MRI is generated by the presence of patient in the magnet and the background electrical noise of the system. All these noises are random in nature and carry no signal information. When an image is contaminated by noise, the correlation between pixels is degraded. As a result, the efficiency of image compression is decreased. We divide the data bits of a pixel into signal and noise bits. The signal bits contain image structural information and occupy the most significant part of the pixel data. The noise bits are contaminated by noise and occupy the least significant part. We can manipulate the noise bits to enhance image compression without affecting image quality. In this study, we use statistical methods to identify the noise bits in the image

Noise Bits Reversible Zeroed Img Compression

Comp Img

Figure. 1 The procedures of pseudo error-free image compression B.Estimation of noise level Standard deviation can be used to estimate the noise for the smoothed parts of the image. Due to the difference of gray levels between objects, the standard deviations calculated directly from original image tend to overestimate the noise levels near boundary. Define a residual image as the subtraction between the original and its signal component images. The signal component image is obtained by median filtering the original

611

image with a 33 window. The subtraction can effectively remove the signal part and leave the noise part in the residual image. Thus the noise levels are the same in both residual and original images. We can then estimate the noise level by the standard deviation calculated from the residual image with a 55 window. C.Noise bits and zeroed image The number of noise bits can be estimated by simply taking the logarithm of the noise level. Let n(x,y) be the noise level of a pixel, then the number of bits contaminated by noise is [log2 n(x,y)], where [x] is the greatest integer function. Note that these noise bits occupy the least significant parts in the bit data of the pixel value. Since the noise bits do not contain any structural information, we can modify them without deteriorating image quality. In this study, we set all the noise bits of an image to zero. Performing a reversible compression on these images will yield better compression ratio than on the original images. D.Reversible image compession Image compression consists of two steps: decorrelation and encoding. A common characteristic of radiological images is that neighboring pixels have a high degree of correlation, which is considered redundant from the viewpoint of image information. Redundancy in the image is first subtracted from the original image to obtain a new image called a decorrelated image. In this study, decorrelation is performed by the subtraction between adjacent pixels. The subtraction is a onedimensional version of the differential pulse code modulation (DPCM). The encoding step is to assign a binary code word to each pixel value of the decorrelated image. The assignment is made in such a way that, on the average, the data rate (bits/pixel) is as close as possible to the entropy of the decorrelated image. The arithmetic coding was used in this study [15]. It assigns a code word to each symbol an interval of real numbers between 0 and 1. It exploits the distribution of the image histogram, by assigning short intervals to the most frequently occurring amplitudes and longer intervals to the others. In theory, arithmetic coding scheme can achieve compression bound established by information entropy. III. RESULTS

method has shown an improvement of 36.8%, 62.7%, and 125% in the compression level for the three data sets. To noise bits infected by noise carry no information and can be manipulated without affecting the image quality. To demonstrate this, image enhancement techniques using 2 magnification and window/leveling were performed on both the original and the denoised images. The results for a MR image and a digitized mammogram are shown in Figure 6 and Figure 7.

Figure. 2 The results for CT data set: (a) the original image, (b) the residual image (window=64, level=0), (c) the denoised image, and (d) the noise level.
3.5 20 18 3 16 2.5 14 12 10 8 6 4 0.5 2 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 0 original denoise noise_level

Compression Ratio

Figure 2 shows the results of the CT data set. Figure. 2(a) is the original image, 2(b) is the median using a 33 windows, 2(c) is the residual image, 2(d) is the noise level calculated. The residual image contains structured edges and noisy background information. Figures 3-5 show the compression ratios and noise levels calculated for the denoised CT, MR, and DR images. The average compression ratios are 2.263, 3.220, and 2.931 respectively, for the three sets of data. The compression ratios are 3.096, 5.239, and 6.604 for the data after denoising. This

1.5

CT image

Figure. 3 The compression ratios and noise levels calculated for the denoised CT images.

612

Noise_level

1 5

o in l rig a d n ise eo n ise b o _ it

1 3

1 1

Compression Ratio

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 1 1 1 1 16 17 18 1 1 2 3 4 5 9 R age MR MIim image Figure. 4 The compression ratios and noise levels calculated for the denoised MR images.
1 0 9 8 6 0 8 0

Noise bit

Figure. 6 Comparison between MR image (left) and its denoised image (right). (a) and (b) are the window/level enhanced images, (c) and (d) are 2 magnified images.

orig inal
7 0

den oise no ise_level

Compression Ratio

7 6 5 4 3 2 0 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 1 1 1 15 1 17 1 19 1 2 3 4 6 8 1 0 0 5 0

3 0

mm o ra h img a mg p y a Mammographyeimage

Figure. 5 The compression ratios and noise levels calculated for the denoised DR images.

Noise level

4 0

Figure. 7 Comparison between digitized mammogram (left) and its denoised image (right). (a) and (b) are the window/level enhanced images, (c) and (d) are 2 magnified images.

613

IV.

DISCUSSION

A. Pseudo lossless Several researchers had proposed different "visually" lossless compression method [15, 16]. They claimed the loss of image data could be tolerated without affecting the visual interpretation of an image. JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) baseline algorithm is the most widely used compression method [17]. It uses block discrete cosine transform to decorrelate the image. The information lost in the compression and reconstruction process will cause blocking artifacts. The JPEG 2000 Committee was established to formulate a new standard based on wavelet compression [17]. The information loss in wavelet method will cause blurring in the reconstructed image. Good et al. [18] used forced-choice just noticeable difference (JND) studies to compare 4K and 2K laser-printed posteroanterior chest images. It is demonstrated that although images are viewed as comparable by radiologists, when forced to choose the better image, they actually select the higherresolution images in 83% of the paired observations. They concluded that small differences in image quality might be detectable even in image sets which are considered to be comparable by subjective assessments. Our method modifies the noise bits of the data. The loss in the data is purely noise and will not cause any loss in visual and information. Thus the method is claimed to be both "visually lossless" and "information preserving". It is our belief that compressed images that are pseudo lossless are diagnostically lossless and should be accepted in clinical application. However, compressed images to be judged as diagnostically lossless requires a full scale of receiver operating characteristic analyses, which are time-consuming and expensive. B. Window size In this study, the window sizes used for signal parts estimation and standard deviation calculation are 33 and 5 5 respectively. For signal estimation, window size needs to be small in order to save detailed information (e.g. thin line). For standard deviation calculation, the window size should be large enough for statistically meaningful. C. Residule image Statistical tests performed on bit planes of the original image tend to overestimate the noise level. The residual image, whose signal part can be effectively removed, is the right choice for correctly measuring the noise bits. The mean filter can smooth the images better than median. However, it blurs image near edge and causes an incomplete removal of signal parts. As a result, the residual image contains edge information which causes the overestimation of the noise. D. Identification of noise bits

Previous reports, we used Moran test to measure the correlation between pixels of an image and identify the bits contaminated by noise [19, 20]. The Moran test used the ratio of covariance and variance among samples as a measure of spatial autocorrelation [21]. A higher value means more correlation between pixels and less likelihood that the image is noisy. The Moran test is performed for each pixel bit by bit and is very time consuming. Our studies indicate that using standard deviation to estimate the noise level is more efficient and yield similar results. E. Compression ratio and noise levels Figures 3-5 show that the compression ratios of the original images are inversely proportional to the noise levels as expected. The improvement in compression ratio is better for images with higher noise levels like mammograms. Note that the improvement in MR images is better than its noise levels indicate. This is due to the fact that the noise levels of MR images are slightly underestimated. The brain occupies only the central area in the MR images, the rests are purely airs where the noise levels are zeros. Kido et al. [22] had suggested that 10:1 compression does not influence detection of subtle interstitial abnormalities of the lungs on digitized chest radiographs. Our method is information lossless and as a result, the compression ratio is smaller than that. One can treat the "denoising" as preprocessing filter and apply the JPEG baseline algorithm on the denoised image to obtain the same (or even better) compression ratio without visually loss. F. JPEG2000 loosy image compression The wavelet transform based image compression algorithms are recognized as a better method to compress, archive and communicate medical images [23]. This algorithm is now available to an extensive medical system user base with the approval of JPEG2000 as the accepted image compression option by DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) Working Group 4. A medical image compression algorithms named Apollo (demo version 1.0.0.315. 2006, provided courtesy of the Pegasus Imaging Corporation, http://www.jpg.com/medical) is coded on JPEG2000. Both a CT and a MR images are chose randomly for comparison. Images were first compressed on compression ratio (original image size / compressed image size) 4, 7, 10 respectively. Following that, the PSNR were estimated. The PSNR are 61.4 dB, 59.9 dB and 56.9 dB for MR images respectively. For CT images, they are 72.8, 71.9 and 70.03 dB which correspond to compression ratio 4, 7, 10 respectively. The PSNR value of our method are 57.5 dB for MR and 69.5 dB for CT images. It is obviously that our processed images equal with 10:1 loosy compression. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Mammography images were provided by courtesy of the National Expert and Training Centre for Breast Cancer

614

Screening and the Department of Radiology at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. REFERENCES
[1] H. K. Huang, PACS Picture Archiving and Communication Systems in Biomedical Imaging. New York, NY:VCH Publishers, 1996. [2] M Rabbani, P.W. Jones, Digital Image Compression Techniques, SPIE Press, 1991. [3] Z. D. Chen, R. F. Chang, W. J. Kuo, Adaptive predictive multiplicative autoregressive model for medical image compression, IEEE Trans Med Img 18:181-184, 1999. [4] H. MacMahon et. al., Data Compression: Effect on diagnostic accuracy in digital chest radiography, Radiology 178:175-179, 1991 [5] S. C. Lo, B. Krasner, S. K. Mun, Noise impact on error-free image compression, IEEE Trans Med Img 9:202-205, 1990. [6] E. J. Halpern, A. Premkumar A et al., Application of region of interest definition to quadtree-based compression of CT images, Invest Radiol 25:703-707, 1990. [7] R. M. Slone, D. H. Foos et al.,Assessment of visually lossless irreversible image compression, Comparison of three methods by using an image-comparison workstation. Radiology 215:543-553, 2000. [8] G. G. Cox, L. T. Cook, M. P. Insana et al., The effects of lossy compression on the detection of subtle pulmonary nodules, Med Phys 23:127-132, 1996 [9] H. P. Chan, L. T. Niklason, D. M. Ikeda, K. L. Lam and D. A. Dorit, Digitization requirements in mammography: Effects on computer- aided detection of microcalcifications, Med Phys 1994; 21: 1203-11. [10] B. K. Steward, S. C. Lo and H. K. Huang, Gray level dynamic range in magnetic resonance imaging, SPIE Proc 1986; 626: 189-95. [11] T. J. Chen, K. S. Chuang, Y. C. Chiang, J. H. Chang, R. S. Liu, A statistical method for evaluation quality of medical images: case study in

[12] [13]

[14]

[15] [16] [17] [18]

[19]

[20]

[21] [22]

[23]

bit discarding and image compression, Comput Med Imaging Graphics 28: 167-175, 2004. S. I. Olsen, Estimation of noise in images: an evaluation., CVGIP 1993; 55: 319-23. K. S. Chuang and H. K. Huang, Comparison of chi-square and jointcount methods for evaluating digital image data,. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 1992; 11: 28-33. K. S. Chuang and H. K. Huang, Assessment of noise in a digital image using the join-count statistic and Moran test, Phys Med Biol 1992; 37: 357-69. I. H. Witten, R.M. Neal, and J.G. Clearly, Arithmetic coding for data compression, Commun ACM 30:52-540, 1987 W. B. Pennebaker, J. L. Mitchell, JPEG still image data compression standard, New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993. R. DeVore, B. Jawerth, B. Lucier, Image compression through wavelet transform coding, IEEE Trans Info Theory 38:719-746, 1992 W. F. Good, D. Gur, J. H. Feist, F. L. Thaete, C. R. Fuhrman, C. A. Britton, B. S. Slasky, Subjective and objective assessment of image quality--a comparison, J Digit Imaging 7:77-8, 1994 K. S. Chuang, H. K. Huang, Assessment of noise in a digital image using the join-count statistic and the Moran test, Phys Med Biol 37:357369, 1992. K. S. Chuang, B. J. Liu, H. K. Huang, H. Yonekawa, A. Sankaran, Noise content analysis in clinical digital images, Radiographics 14: 397403, 1994. P. Moran, The interpretation of statistical maps, J Royal Stat Soc Series B 10:243-251, 1948. S. Kido, J. Ikezoe, H. Kondoh, et al, Detection of subtle interstitial abnormalities of the lungs on digital chest radiographs: acceptable data compression ratio, AJR Am J Roentgenol 111-115, 1996. Y. H. Shiao, T. J. Chen, K. S. Chuang, C. H. Lin, and C. C. Chuang, Quality of Compressed Medical Images, J Digital Imaging 20:149-159, 2007.

615