Progressive lossless compression of image data

Abstract

Techniques and configurations for compression of image data in a progressive, lossless manner are disclosed. In an example, three-dimensional medical images may be compressed and decompressed with high-speed operations, through a compression technique performed on a cube (chunk) of voxels that includes generating a subsampled or filtered cube of voxels, and generating and optimizing a delta data set between the cube of voxels and the subsampled cube of voxels. This optimized delta data set is operable with a decompression technique to losslessly recreate the cube of voxels. Further, the compression technique may be progressively performed with multiple iterations, to allow multiple lower resolution versions of the images prior to loading or receiving the entire compressed data that is reconstructable in a lossless form. Use of this technique may result in dramatically reduced time to first image when visualizing 3D images and performing image data transfers.