Gridding and compression of microarray images

With the recent explosion of interest in microarray technology, massive amounts of microarray images are currently being produced. The storage and the transmission of this type of data are becoming increasingly challenging. Here we propose lossless and lossy compression algorithms for microarray images originally digitized at 16 bpp (bits per pixels) that achieve an average of 9.5-11.5 bpp (lossless) and 4.6-6.7 bpp (lossy, with a PSNR of 63 dB). The lossy compression is applied only on the background of the image, thereby preserving the regions of interest. The methods are based on a completely automatic gridding procedure of the image.