Joint Optimization of Rate, Distortion, and Maximum Absolute Error for Compression of Medical Volumes Using HEVC Intra

Many visual quality metrics are used to measure the quality of lossy compressed images and videos, and are integrated in the rate-distortion optimization of hybrid video codecs. However, most of the metrics focus on the average objective quality in a picture. In certain applications, like medical image processing, the maximum absolute error should be more weighted. In this paper, the rate-distortion optimization of HEVC is extended by integrating this error metric. Thus, rate, average error, and maximum absolute error are jointly optimized. Furthermore, a weighting factor α is included into the calculation of the optimization for balancing the ratio between average and maximum absolute error. For HEVC intra with $\alpha =0.25$ an average maximum absolute error reduction of −25.63 can be achieved, while the bitrate increases slightly by 0.59%. Furthermore, the visual quality of the medical volumes improves and the data fidelity increases, i.e. less block artifacts appear and less structure disappear.