Lossless Compression Methods for Real-Time Images

This paper proposes and implements two lossless methods, to compress real-time greyscale medical images, which are Huffman coding and a new lossless method called Reduced Lossless Compression Method (RLCM), both of which were tested when applying a random sample of greyscale medical images with a size of 256×256 pixels. Different factors were measured to check the compression method performances such as the compression time, the compressed image size, and the compression ratio (CR). The system is fully implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) using a fully hardware based (no software driven processor) system architecture. A Terasic DE4 board was used as the main platform for implementing and testing the system using Quartus-II software and tools for design and debugging. The impact of compressing the image and carrying the compressed data through parallel lines is like the impact of compressed the same image inside a single core with a higher compression ratio, in this system between 7.5 and 126.8.