An Improved Three Pattern Huffman Compression Algorithm for Medical Images in Telemedicine

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to effectively improve the existing Huffman lossless compression algorithm and to evaluate its performance on various types of medical imaging data like CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and X-ray images. Huffman Algorithm is a statistical coding technique. It is technically simple to implement for both the purposes of encoding and decoding .In this paper, a pattern finder component is proposed, which determines the best component and the most frequent occurring pattern in the image to be transmitted via the telemedicine network. The best pattern will be an input to the encoder and the output of the encoder would be the compressed image and the footer information. The footer information comprises of the data which were compressed and needs to be inserted at the decoder component. The proposed pattern replacement greatly enhances the performance in terms of improved compression ratios over the existing system. It is aptly applicable for data transfer where bandwidth should be at an optimal level. The present work yields 4-5% improved compression ratio, thereby permitting reduced traffic on the telemedicine network.