Ultrasound video coding using a three-dimensional subband decomposition

This paper addresses the problem of transmission of real-time cardiology ultrasound video over telephone and ISDN lines. The high compression ratios needed for this application are achieved using a nonlinear model-based decomposition of the ultrasound sequence into structure and text are components. These components are encoded using a three-dimensional subband coder and an entropy-constrained residual vector quantizer, respectively. The new algorithm is implementable in real time on currently available hardware and achieves more than two-fold quality improvement over H.263