Performance Evaluation of DCT, DWT and SPIHT Techniques for Medical Image Compression

Medical imaging is, visible illustration of internal of the human body in digital form. There exists a need for compression of these medical images for storage and transmission purposes with high image quality for error free diagnosis of diseases. It is necessary to develop new techniques for compression of images, resulting into reduction in cost of data storage and transmission. This paper proposes a progressive and DWT-based Set Partition in Hierarchical Tree (SPIHT) algorithm for achieving better image compression while maintaining the nature of restored image. The performance of SPIHT algorithm is evaluated and compared with simple DCT and DWT using the parameters like Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and compression ratio (CR). From the results it is concluded that SPIHT algorithm produces better PSNR and MSE values compared to DCT and DWT with high image quality.