Still medical image coding in noisy communication environments

The coding and transmission of medical images over noisy channels are investigated. The proposed coding scheme is based on vector quantization and the codebook is created by Kohonen's neural approach. In conjunction with the ordered codebook, an appropriate QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) is used for transmission, which results in eliminating a high ratio of transmission errors. Residual erroneous blocks are eliminated by applying a post-processing method on the received image. Based on the visual similarity between each block and its local context, the impulse block noises are detected and corrected. Using the proposed approach, the reconstructed image quality is acceptable even when the channel is extremely noisy.