Learning-based parameter prediction for quality control in three-dimensional medical image compression

Quality control is of vital importance in compressing three-dimensional (3D) medical imaging data. Optimal compression parameters need to be determined based on the specific quality requirement. In high efficiency video coding (HEVC), regarded as the state-of-the-art compression tool, the quantization parameter (QP) plays a dominant role in controlling quality. The direct application of a video-based scheme in predicting the ideal parameters for 3D medical image compression cannot guarantee satisfactory results. In this paper we propose a learning-based parameter prediction scheme to achieve efficient quality control. Its kernel is a support vector regression (SVR) based learning model that is capable of predicting the optimal QP from both video-based and structural image features extracted directly from raw data, avoiding time-consuming processes such as pre-encoding and iteration, which are often needed in existing techniques. Experimental results on several datasets verify that our approach outperforms current video-based quality control methods.