• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.495-508
• /
• 2015

In this paper, a novel robust medical images watermarking scheme is proposed. In traditional methods, the added watermark may alter the host medical image in an irreversible manner and may mask subtle details. Consequently, we propose a method for medical image copyright protection that may remedy this problem by embedding the watermark without modifying the original host image. The proposed method is based on the visual cryptography concept and the dominant blocks of wavelet coefficients. The logic in using the blocks dominants map is that local features, such as contours or edges, are unique to each image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can withstand several image processing attacks such as cropping, filtering, compression, etc.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.217-226
• /
• 2012

This study examines image quality of medical image after compression using JPEG2000 for AAPM CT Performance Phantom in PACS. The compressed images of 15:1 showed change of 1.93% and 0.81% in the CT number of water and the slice thickness, respectively, compared to the original images. The variation of the uniformity did not give a correlation for each measured area. In noise measurements at compressions of 10:1 and 15:1, changes of 1.47% to 10.99% were observed, respectively. The noise showed incremation tendency as increasing over the compression ratio 15:1, and the noise of 81.68% was measured at a compression of 40:1. CT number, uniformity, slice thickness, spatial resolution and contrast resolution for the compressed images were slightly changed by increasing the compression ratio. However, the noise was seriously changed relatively at the compressed images. Thus the noise was a important factor to determine the compression ration. A compression ratio of 10:1 for the AAPM CT Performance Phantom image was appropriate and could be applied to diagnostic images.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.4 no.3
• /
• pp.263-269
• /
• 2003

This paper focuses on lossy medical image compression methods for medical images that operate on three-dimensional(3D) irreversible integer wavelet transform. We offer an application of the Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees(SPIHT) algorithm〔l-3〕to medical images, using a 3-D wavelet decomposition and a 3-D spatial dependence tree. The wavelet decomposition is accomplished with integer wavelet filters implemented with the lifting method, where careful scaling and truncations keep the integer precision small and the transform unitary. As the compression rate increases, the boundaries between adjacent coding units become increasingly visible. Unlike video, the volume image is examined under static condition, and must not exhibit such boundary artifacts. In order to eliminate them, we utilize overlapping at axial boundaries between adjacent coding units. We have tested our encoder on medical images using different integer filters. Results show that our algorithm with certain filters performs as well. The improvement is visibly manifested as fewer ringing artifacts and noticeably better reconstruction of low contrast.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.38-43
• /
• 2004

We designed and implemented a medical image query system, including a relational database and DBMS (database management system), which can visualize image data and can achieve spatial, attribute, and mixed queries. Image data used in querying can be visualized in slice, MPR(multi-planner reformat), volume rendering, and overlapping on the query system. To reduce spatial cost and processing time in the system. brain images are spatially clustered, by an adaptive Hilbert curve filling, encoded, and stored to its database without loss for spatial query. Because the query is often applied to small image regions of interest(ROI's), the technique provides higher compression rate and less processing time in the cases.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.22 no.12
• /
• pp.2714-2726
• /
• 1997

In this paper, adaptive symbol changes-based medical image compression method is presented. First, the differenctial image domain is obtained using the differentiation rules or obaptive predictors applied to original mdeical image. Also, the algorithm determines the context associated with the differential image from the domain. Then prediction symbols which are thought tobe the most probable differential image values are maintained at a high value through the adaptive symbol changes procedure based on estimates of the symbols with polarity coincidence between the differential image values to be coded under to context and differential image values in the model template. At the coding step, the differential image values are encoded as "predicted" or "non-predicted" by the binary adaptive arithmetic encoder, where a binary decision tree is employed. The simlation results indicate that the prediction hit ratios of differential image values using the proposed algorithm improve the coding gain by 25% and 23% than arithmetic coder with ISO JPEG lossless predictor and arithmetic coder with differentiation rules or adaptive predictors, respectively. It can be used in compression part of medical PACS because the proposed method allows the encoder be directly applied to the full bit-planes medical image without a decomposition of the full bit-plane into a series of binary bit-planes as well as lower complexity of encoder through using an additions when sub-dividing recursively unit intervals.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
• /
• 2002.09a
• /
• pp.489-491
• /
• 2002

The need for video diagnosis in medicine has been increased and real-time transfer of digital video will be an important component in PACS and telemedicine. But, Network environment has certain limitations that the required throughput can not satisfy quality of service (QoS). MPEG-4 ratified as a moving video standard by the ISO/IEC provides very efficient video coding covering the various ranges of low bit-rate in network environment. We implemented MPEG-4 CODEC (coder/decoder) and applied various compression ratios to moving ultrasound images. These images were displayed in random order on a client monitor passed through network. Radiologists determined subjective opinion scores for evaluating clinically acceptable image quality and then these were statistically processed in the t-Test method. Moreover the MPEG-4 decoded images were quantitatively analyzed by computing peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) to objectively evaluate image quality. The bit-rate to maintain clinically acceptable image quality was up to 0.8Mbps. We successfully implemented the adaptive throughput or bit-rate relative to the image quality of ultrasound sequences used MPEG-4 that can be applied for diagnostic performance in real-time.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.40 no.5
• /
• pp.179-188
• /
• 2019

In ultrasound telemedicine, it is important to reduce the size of the data by compressing the ultrasound image when sending it. Ultrasound images can be divided into image context and other information consisting of patient ID, date, and several letters. Between them, ultrasound context is very important information for diagnosis and should be securely preserved as much as possible. In several previous papers, ultrasound compression methods were proposed to compress ultrasound context and other information into different compression parameters. This ultrasound compression method minimized the loss of ultrasound context while greatly compressing other information. This paper proposed the method of automatic segmentation of ultrasound context to overcome the limitation of the previously described ultrasound compression method. This algorithm was designed to robust for various ultrasound device and to enable real-time operation to maintain the benefits of ultrasound imaging machine. The operation time of extracting ultrasound context through the proposed segmentation method was measured, and it took 311.11 ms. In order to optimize the algorithm, the ultrasound context was segmented with down sampled input image. When the resolution of the input image was reduced by half, the computational time was 126.84 ms. When the resolution was reduced by one-third, it took 45.83 ms to segment the ultrasound context. As a result, we verified through experiments that the proposed method works in real time.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 1993.07a
• /
• pp.504-506
• /
• 1993

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) standard was proposed by the International Standardization Organization (ISO/SC 29/WG 10) and the CCITT SG VIII as an international standard for digital continuous-tone still image compression. The JPEG standard has been widely accepted in electronic imaging, computer graphics, and multi-media applications, however, due to the lossy character of the JPEG compression its application in the field of medical imaging has been limited. In this paper, the JPEG standard was applied to a series of head sections of magnetic resonance (MR) images (256 gray levels, $256{\times}256$ size) and its performance was investigated. For this purpose, DCT-based sequential mode of the JPEG standard was implemented using the CL550 compression chip and progressive and lossless coding was implemented by software without additional hardware. From the experiment, it appears that the compression ratio of about 10 to 20 was obtained for the MR images without noticeable distortion. It is also noted that the error signal between the reconstructed image by the JPEG and the original image was nearly random noise without causing any special-pattern-related artifact. Although the coding efficiency of the progressive and hierarchical coding is identical to that of the sequential coding in compression ratio and SNR, it has useful features In fast search of patient Image from huge image data base and in remote diagnosis through slow public communication channel.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
• /
• v.1997 no.05
• /
• pp.95-100
• /
• 1997

In this paper, we propose a coding method to improve compression efficiency for MR image. This can be achieved by combining coding and segmentation scheme which removes noisy background region, which is meaningless for diagnosis, in MR image. The wavelet coder encodes only diagnostically significant foreground regions refering to segmentation map. Our proposed algorithm provides about 15% of bitrate reduction when compared with the same coder which is not combined with segmentation scheme. And the proposed scheme shows better reconstructed image Qualify than JPEG at the same compression ratio.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.3 no.3
• /
• pp.597-605
• /
• 1999

In this paper, we propose a cardioangiography sequence image coding scheme which use a subtraction between initial image and current frame inserted contrast dye. Stable regions are obtained by the multithreshold and meaningful region is extracted by the images with stable region. The image with meaningful region is classified into contour and texture information. Contour information is coded by contour coding. And texture information is approximated by two-dimensional polynomial function and each coefficients is coded. Experimental results confirm that the sequence of cardioangiography are well reconstructed at the low bit rate (0.02∼0.04 bpp) and high compression ratio.