A hardware implementation of fractal quadtree compression for medical images

Medical images contain voluminous data. Transmission of medical images over the Internet using low bandwidth and fast transmission is a major challenge. Image compression techniques address this issue using cost-effective methods. Fractal image compression is a compression technique used in digital image compression to increase the transmission rate with low bandwidth. This is based on the fact that some parts of an image always resemble another part of the same image. This concept is called self-similarity. Fractal image compression has long encoding time of seconds and fast decoding time. In this paper, we propose and implement architecture for fractal image compression. This architecture has been implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA board and tested on medical images. The proposed implementation reduces the encoding time to nanoseconds. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.