Robustness of a perceptually lossless medical image coder: Interpolation

Perceptually lossless medical image coding is an alternative for compressing medical images. It provides a solution to the challenge of delivering clinically critical information in the shortest time possible. In this paper, an investigation of the robustness of the perceptually lossless image coder is carried out by applying bilinear, biquadratic and bicubic standard and centered B-spline interpolation filters. In order to evaluate the visual performance, a subjective assessment was conducted consisting of 30 medical images and 6 image processing experts. Here, the perceptually lossless medical image coder was compared to the state-of-the-art JPEG-LS compliant LOCO and NLOCO image coders. Current results have shown that overall, there were no perceivable differences of statistical significance when the medical images were enlarged by a factor of 2.