Post-Segmentation Approach for Lossless Region of Interest Coding

This paper presents a lossless region of interest coding technique that is suitable for interactive telemedicine over networks. The new encoding scheme allows a server to transmit only a part of a compressed image data progressively as a client requests it. This technique is different from region scalable coding in JPEG2000 since it does not define region of interest (ROI) when encoding occurs. In the proposed method, the image is fully encoded and stored in the server. It also allows a user to select a ROI after the compression is done. This feature is the main contribution of research. The proposed coding method achieves the region scalable coding by using the integer wavelet lifting, successive quantization, and partitioning that rearranges the wavelet coefficients into subsets. Each subset that represents a local area in an image is then separately coded using run-length and entropy coding. In this paper, we will show the benefits of using the proposed technique with examples and simulation results.