Fast Intra and Inter Prediction Mode Decision of H.264/AVC for Medical Image Compression Based on Region of Interest

Abstract

This paper aims at applying H.264 in medical video compression applications and improving the H.264 Compression performance with better perceptual quality and low coding complexity. In order to achieve higher compression of medical video, while maintaining high image quality in the region of interest, with low coding complexity, here we propose a new model using H.264/AVC that uses lossless compression in the region of interest, and very high rate, lossy compression in other regions. This paper proposes a new method to achieve fast intra and inter prediction mode decision that is based on coarse macroblocks for intra and inter prediction mode decision of the background region and finer macroblocks for region of interest. Also the macroblocks of the background region are encoded with the maximum quantization parameter allowed by H.264/AVC in order to maximize the number of null coefficients. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a higher compression rate on medical videos with a higher quality of region of interest with low coding complexity when compared to our previous algorithm and other standard algorithms reported in the literature.

Keywords

• H.264/AVC
• intra- and inter-prediction
• medical video compression
• adaptive search range decision
• Region of interest