Real-time distortionless high-factor compression scheme.

Abstract

Nowadays, digital subtraction angiography systems must be able to sustain real-time acquisition (30 frames per second) of 512 x 512 x 8 bit images and store several sequences of such images on low cost and general-purpose mass memories. Concretely, that means a 7.8 Mbytes per second rate and about 780 Mbytes disk space to hold a 100-s cardiac examination. To fulfill these requirements at competitive cost, a distortionless compressor/decompressor system can be designed: during acquisition, the real-time compressor transforms the input images into a lower quantity of coded information through a predictive coder and a variable-length Huffman code. The process is fully reversible because during review, the real-time decompressor exactly recovers the acquired images from the stored compressed data. Test results on many raw images demonstrate that real-time compression is feasible and takes place with absolutely no loss of information. The designed system indifferently works on 512 or 1024 formats, and 256 or 1024 gray levels.