Low bit rate Intra prediction coding for Medical image Sequences using HEVC Standard

Rural health care center, storage and effective retrieval of medical images or volumetric medical videos is one of the important requirement for Telemedicine application. Most of the medical images or 3D images are in DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format. Early compression standard like JPEG2000 was inefficient and unsuitable for this kind of imagery. New HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) standard consist features like intra prediction, refined coding tool such as 35 prediction modes and ability to divide picture into Coding Unit (CU) to utilize all redundancies like Spatial, Temporal and Stastical. Dynamic Quad tree structure of HEVC provides substantial improvement in coding gain performance but adversely it also effect computational complexity. Here, we analyze the ability of HEVC standard to reduce the bit rate that represents medical image content with desired perceptual quality. In this paper, we proposed the dynamic degeneration of CU approach to obtain the improvement in visual quality of medical images with limited bit rate. Quantitative analyses is done by varying the CU block size, which give drastic reduction in bit rate (61.25% on average) with very small change in PSNR (2.01% on average).