Medical Image Compression in WBCT Domain Using Fast FIC and SPIHT Coding

Fractal image coding encodes the input image with low bit rate and decodes the same with the reasonable quality of reconstruction. But, FIC has the demerit of longer time taken for encoding. In this paper, a fractal and SPIHT encoding of WBCT coefficients is proposed. Fast fractal encoding using particle swarm optimization (PSO) is applied to the low pass sub band of wavelet based contourlet transformed image and a modified set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) coding is applied on the remaining coefficients. PSO technique and reduced domain pool size will speed up the fractal encoder, whereas the WBCT coefficients preserve the image quality in case of smooth contoured images. Furthermore, image details and wavelet progressive transmission characteristics are maintained. Experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm provides better quality of reconstruction with reduced bit rate.