Compressing images with wavelet/subband coding

We have developed software modules (both stand-alone and in the biomedical image analysis and display package ANALYZE) that perform wavelet-based compression on both 2-D and 3-D gray scale images. We present examples of such compression on a variety of medical images, and comparisons with JPEG and other compression schemes. We also show examples of the improvements gained by true 3-D compression of a 3-D image (as opposed to 2-D compression of each slice), and discuss issues such as the treatment of edge effects and human visual system response in the context of a wavelet-based approach. Finally, we discuss extensions of the current approach to still more efficient compression schemes