Medical Ultrasound Video Coding with H.265/HEVC Based on ROI Extraction

Yueying Wu, Pengyu Liu, Yuan Gao, Kebin Jia, Heye Zhang
2016 PLoS ONE  
High-efficiency video compression technology is of primary importance to the storage and transmission of digital medical video in modern medical communication systems. To further improve the compression performance of medical ultrasound video, two innovative technologies based on diagnostic region-of-interest (ROI) extraction using the high efficiency video coding (H.265/HEVC) standard are presented in this paper. First, an effective ROI extraction algorithm based on image textural features is
more » ... roposed to strengthen the applicability of ROI detection results in the H.265/HEVC quad-tree coding structure. Second, a hierarchical coding method based on transform coefficient adjustment and a quantization parameter (QP) selection process is designed to implement the otherness encoding for ROIs and non-ROIs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy significantly improves the coding performance by achieving a BD-BR reduction of 13.52% and a BD-PSNR gain of 1.16 dB on average compared to H.265/HEVC (HM15.0). The proposed medical video coding algorithm is expected to satisfy low bit-rate compression requirements for modern medical communication systems. An effective and rapid ROI extraction strategy, which can be appropriate for both the characteristics of medical images and the special coding structure in H.265/HEVC, is the foundation for optimizing coding performance. According to the human visual selective attention mechanism, prominent texture regions might attract more attention than sparse texture regions. For medical video in particular, Medical Ultrasound Video Coding with H.265/HEVC Based on ROI Extraction PLOS ONE |
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165698 pmid:27814367 pmcid:PMC5096667 fatcat:cgbc33epanafncqmekg7nhmyry