HIERARCHICAL STILL IMAGE CODING USING MODIFIED GOLOMB-RICE CODE FOR MEDICAL IMAGE INFORMATION SYSTEM

This paper porposes and efficient coding scheme for remote medical communication systems, or“telemedicine systems”. These systems require a technique which is able to transfer large volume of data such as X-ray images effectively. We have already developed a hierarchical image coding and transmission scheme (HITS), which achieves an efficient transmission of medical images simply[1]. In this paper, a new coding scheme for HITS is proposed, which used hierarchical context modeling for the purpose of improving the coding efficiency. The hierarchical context modeling divides wavelet coefficients into several sets by the value of a correspondent coefficient in their higher class, or“a parent”, optimizes a Golomb-Rice (GR) code parameter in each set, and then encodes the coefficients with the parameter. Computer simulation shows that the proposed scheme is effective with simple implementation. This is due to fact that a wavelet coefficient has dependence on its parent. As a result, high speed data transmission is achieved even if the telemedicine system consists of simple personal computers.