Medical Image Compression: Study of the Influence of Noise on the JPEG 2000 Compression Performance

Abstract

In this paper, the efficiency of the JPEG2000 scheme combined with a complementary denoising process is analyzed on simulated and real denial ortho-pantomographic images, where the simulation images are perturbed by Poisson noise. The case of dental radiography is investigated, because radiographic images are a combination between the relevant signal and a significant amount of acquisition noise, which is per definition not compressible. The noise behaves generally close to Poisson statistics, which generally affects the compression performance. The denoising process is supported by Monte Carlo noise modeling, which is introduced in the JPEG 2000 compression scheme to improve the compression efficiency of the medical images in terms of compression ratio and image quality. Fifty selected images are denoised and the compression ratio, using lossless and lossy JPEG 2000, is reported and evaluated