Evaluation of the Improvement in Hierarchical Lossless Video Compression

The digital medical video is widely used in several healthcare institutions and medical centers. Therefore, a considerable storage space and a high transmission bandwidth are necessary. Thus, efficient compression tools are required to reduce the storage space and fit bandwidth capacities. Indeed, several lossy and lossless compression techniques are applied. Lossy techniques ensure a good performance. But they lead to erroneous medical data, which can negatively affect the doctor's decisions about the patient's health conditions. As a result, lossless compression guarantees an optimal solution for medical applications. Among available lossless techniques, H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) presents high coding performance in lossless compression. H.264/AVC was chosen since it simplicity in terms of computational complexity. It is suitable for mobile devices that require high resolution. In this paper, several techniques used with the H.264/AVC are discussed. Moreover, a new approach is applied to enhance the lossless techniques. Its results show an important compression ratio compared to the previous works. The enhanced method results in an increase in compression ratio from 8,429 to 16,159. Besides, the gain performance reaches from 32,625 to 42.074 %.