Hierarchical Coding of 3-D Medical Image with Contour Extraction

Abstract

This paper presents a hierarchical compression method for 3-D medical image data with contour extrac-tion for improving compression performance. The 3-D image is regarded as a set of 2-D images, Snakes with complex AR model is applied to one of the 2-D images to extract the contour, and contour extraction in the neighboring images is efficiently done by propagating the one result to neighboring images. The contour data and the 3-D image data inside the extracted contour are coded by the DPCM method and a hierarchical coding method, respectively. The proposed compression method is applied to a 3-D medical image to show the effectiveness.