Simple graphic manipulation

Modern graphic manipulation software is quick and simple to use, and allows medical quality graphics to be produced for online publication. This article demonstrates, step by step, how submitted images are processed by the journal in preparation for publication.peer-reviewe

Less redundant codes for variable size dictionaries

We report on a family of variable-length codes with less redundancy than the flat code used in most of the variable size dictionary-based compression methods. The length of codes belonging to this family is still bounded above by [log_2/ |D|] where |D| denotes the dictionary size. We describe three of these codes, namely, the balanced code, the phase-in-binary code (PB), and the depth-span code (DS). As the name implies, the balanced code is constructed by a height balanced tree, so it has the shortest average codeword length. The corresponding coding tree for the PB code has an interesting property that it is made of full binary phases, and thus the code can be computed efficiently using simple binary shifting operations. The DS coding tree is maintained in such a way that the coder always finds the longest extendable codeword and extends it until it reaches the maximum length. It is optimal with respect to the code-length contrast. The PB and balanced codes have almost similar improvements, around 3% to 7% which is very close to the relative redundancy in flat code. The DS code is particularly good in dealing with files with a large amount of redundancy, such as a running sequence of one symbol. We also did some empirical study on the codeword distribution in the LZW dictionary and proposed a scheme called dynamic block shifting (DBS) to further improve the codes' performance. Experiments suggest that the DBS is helpful in compressing random sequences. From an application point of view, PB code with DBS is recommended for general practical usage

Hybrid LZW compression

The Science Data Management and Science Payload Operations subpanel reports from the NASA Conference on Scientific Data Compression (Snowbird, Utah in 1988) indicate the need for both lossless and lossy image data compression systems. The ranges developed by the subpanel suggest ratios of 2:1 to 4:1 for lossless coding and 2:1 to 6:1 for lossy predictive coding. For the NASA Freedom Science Video Processing Facility it would be highly desirable to implement one baseline compression system which would meet both of these criteria. Presented here is such a system, utilizing an LZW hybrid coding scheme which is adaptable to either type of compression. Simulation results are presented with the hybrid LZW algorithm operating in each of its modes

Multiresolution source coding using entropy constrained dithered scalar quantization

In this paper, we build multiresolution source codes using entropy constrained dithered scalar quantizers. We demonstrate that for n-dimensional random vectors, dithering followed by uniform scalar quantization and then by entropy coding achieves performance close to the n-dimensional optimum for a multiresolution source code. Based on this result, we propose a practical code design algorithm and compare its performance with that of the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm on natural images