Hierarchical image transmission system for telemedicine using segmented wavelet transform and Golomb-Rice codes

This paper proposes an efficient coding scheme for remote medical communication systems, or “telemedicine systems”. These systems require a technique which is able to transfer a large volume of data such as X-ray images effectively. We developed a hierarchical image coding and transmission system in order to achieve an efficient transmission of medical images over the Internet. The coding system employs a lossless hierarchical coding scheme with wavelet transform to be applied for each segment within a whole image. Furthermore, it uses Golomb-Rice (GR) codes both for high efficiency coding and high speed decoding. The client-server system based on the proposed scheme is implemented with Java language. The system implementation proves that the proposed system is very suitable for telemedicine through a ISDN or LAN environment in terms of high speed medical image transmission and decoding with normal personal computers