Gabor function-based medical image compression

Compression methods based on Gabor functions are implemented for simulated nuclear medicine liver images with and without lesions. The performance of the compression schemes is assessed objectively by comparing the original images to the compressed/reconstructed images through calculation of the Hotelling trace, an index that has been shown to correlate well with performance for images from this imaging modality. For compression based on thresholding the complex Gabor coefficients, a better than 2:1 compression is obtained without appreciable reduction in image quality, which, when combined with gains expected from bit reduction schemes, corresponds to an overall approximate 8:1 compression.