Confocal microscopic image sequence compression using vector quantization and three-dimensional pyramid

The three-dimensional (3-D) pyramid compressor project at the University of Glasgow has developed a compressor for images obtained from confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) device. The proposed method using a combination of image pyramid coder and vector quantization techniques has good performance at compressing confocal volume image data. An experiment was conducted on several kinds of CLSM data using the presented compressor compared with other well-known volume data compressors, such as MPEG-1.(1) The results showed that the 3-D pyramid compressor gave a higher subjective and objective image quality of reconstructed images at the same compression ratio, and presented more acceptable results when applying image processing filters on reconstructed images.