| The objective of the proposed research is to study the use of subband coding in telemedicine applications. Very low bit rates are considered that allow the transmission of medical images over conventional voice and ISDN telephone lines. For ultrasound video, a very low bit rate coder is proposed, based on a nonlinear model-based decomposition of the ultrasound sequence into structure and texture components. These components are encoded using a three-dimensional subband coder and an entropy-constrained residual vector quantizer, respectively. For high-resolution X-ray and magnetic resonance images, pre- and postprocessing techniques are introduced that improve coding performance by exploiting the particular viewing methods of these images. Special attention is given to real-time implementation issues. |
