A Study on the Influence of Image Dynamics and Noise on the JPEG 2000 Compression Performance for Medical Images

This paper investigates a complementary compression concept to the JPEG 2000 standard for improving the compression efficiency of medical images, in terms of compression ratio and image quality, by introducing a denoising process before the application of the JPEG2000 compression. The case of dental radiography is assessed, where the JPEG 2000 compression standard is appropriately tuned to fit medical diagnosis demands to the compression ratio. Indeed, radiographic images are a combination between the relevant signal and the acquisition noise that is per definition not compressible. The noise behaves generally close to Poisson statistics, which generally affects the compression performance. In this paper, the efficiency of the JPEG2000 combined with a denoising process is analyzed on simulated and real dental ortho-pan-tomographic images. The test images are simulated using Poissonian statistics and a Monte Carlo noise modeling method. A hundred selected images are denoised and the compression ratio, using lossless and lossy JPEG 2000, is reported and evaluated.