Rapid high quality compression of volume data for visualization

Volume data sets resulting from, e.g., computerized tomography (CT) or magn etic resonance (MR) imaging modalities require enormous storage capacity ev en at moderate resolution levels. Such large files may require compression for processing in CPU memory which, however, comes at the cost of decoding times and some loss in reconstruction quality with respect to the original data. For many typical volume visualization applications (rendering of volu me slices, subvolumes of interest, or isosurfaces) only a part of the volum e data needs to be decoded. Thus, efficient compression techniques are need ed that provide random access and rapid decompression of arbitrary parts th e volume data. We propose a technique which is block based and operates in the wavelet transformed domain. We report performance results which compare favorably with previously published methods yielding large reconstruction quality gains from about 6 to 12 dB in PSNR for a 512(3)-volume extracted f rom the Visible Human data set. In terms of compression our algorithm compr essed the data 6 times as much as the previous state-of-the-art block based coder for a given PSNR quality.