2016 XI International Symposium on Telecommunications (BIHTEL)
October 24-26, 2016, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Application of Neural Networks to Compression of
CT Images
Emir Turajli
Faculty of Electrical Engineering,
University of Sarajevo
Sarajevo, Bosna and Hercegovina
emir.turajlic@etf.unsa.ba
Abstract Efficient compression of medical images is needed
to decrease the storage space and enable efficient image transfer
over network for access of electronic patient records. Since the
medical images contain diagnostically relevant information, it is
necessary for the process of image compression to preserve high
levels of image fidelity, especially when the images are compressed
at low bit rates. This paper investigates the capacity of an artificial
neural network framework for medical image compression.
Specifically, the performance of the proposed image compression
method is evaluated on a database of computed tomography
images of lungs, where PSNR and MSE are used as the principal
image quality metrics. The compressed image data is derived from
the hidden layer outputs, where the artificial neural networks are
trained to reconstruct the network input features. The results of
image block segmentation are used as the network training
features. The paper proposes the use of Kohonen's self-organizing
maps for segmentation of feature space and the use of multiple
finely tuned multi-layer perceptrons to achieve an improved
compression performance. This paper presents a study on how the
choice of block size, network architecture, and training method
affect the compression performance. An attempt is made to
optimize the artificial neural network framework for the
compression of computed tomography lung images.
KeywordsSignal processing, Image Processing, Artificial
Intelligence.
I. INTRODUCTION
For a long time, image compression has had an important
role in the development of a range of multimedia computer
services and telecommunication applications, including
teleconferencing, digital broadcast codec and video technology,
etc. With the recent significant growth in e-health,
telemedicine, teleconsultation and teleradiology, there is an
increasing research interest in the field of medical images
compression [1]. Digital representation of medical images has
an indispensable role in medical diagnostics, and thus, it is
necessary for the image compression to effectively preserve the
resolution as well as the perceptual quality of medical images.
In fact, the principal aim of image compression is to impose the
least amount degradation to the diagnostically relevant
information, while enabling effective archiving and transferring
of medical images, with respect to the available communication
and storage channels [2]. Another important issue in medical
image compression that needs to be considered is the fact that
978-1-5090-2902-0/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE
acceptable fidelity and compression ratios differ among various
types of medical images, e.g. CT, MRI etc.
Digital image compression methods can be broadly
classified in two groups, lossy and lossless methods [3].
Lossless technique achieve compression by exploiting
statistical and/or spatial redundancies in an image and as such
are able to recover original image perfectly. On the other hand,
lossy image compression methods can also reduce psychovisual
image redundancies and can generally attain much higher
compression ratios at the cost of irreversibly degrading image
quality.
Some examples of widely employed lossless image
compression methods include arithmetic encoding [4],
Huffman encoding [5] and run-length encoding [3]. Successful
approaches to lossy image compression include fractal coding
[6-8] vector quantization [9, 10], DCT transform coding [11-
13], wavelet transform [14-16] and neural network based
compression [17-20].
Artificial neural networks have been successfully applied to
a broad spectrum of applications, from speech processing [21],
medicine [22], power engineering [23], to finance [24]. This
paper investigates the capacity of artificial neural networks for
compression of computed tomography images of lungs.
Artificial neural network based image compression commonly
relies on adopting a feedforward neural network structure that
is trained to reconstruct the input features at its output. Having
a smaller number of neurons in the hidden layer compared to
the input and output layers of the network, the outputs of the
hidden layer in fact represent the compressed image data.
Commonly, network training relies on block segmentation of
images to generate the training data for the network.
This paper investigates how image segmentation block size,
network architecture, and training method influence image
compression performance. In addition, the paper proposes the
use of Kohonens Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) for feature
space segmentation and the use of multiple finely tuned multi-
layer perceptrons to improve the compression performance for
computer tomography images of lungs. An attempt is made to
optimize the artificial neural network based image compression
method so as to attain the best CT image quality, as defined by
various objective quality measures, at a given bit-rate.
Fig. 1. A multilayer perceptron
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
section II, a review of a multilayer perceptron, along with the
considered training methods is presented. A brief overview of
self-organizing maps is also presented in this section. The
proposed system for compression of CT images of lungs is
presented in section III. Section IV presents and discusses the
experimental results. Section V concludes the paper.
II. ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS
A. A Multilayer Perceptron
Fig. 1 presents a schematic diagram of a three layer
multilayer perceptron consisting of the input layer with L
inputs, a hidden layer with H neurons and the output layer with
K neurons. Each neuron computes the weighted sum of its
inputs and subsequently, passes the output through an activation
function to obtain a neuron response. Here, the input and output
layers are fully connected to the hidden layer. The outputs of
the hidden layer are passed to the decoder which consists of the
neural network structure that links the outputs of the hidden
layer to the outputs of the neural network. In the process of
image compressions, the number of inputs, L, is equated to the
number of outputs, K and the neural network is trained to
reconstruct the input features at its output. Thus, image
compression is achieved by selecting a smaller number of
neurons in the hidden layer H, relative to the input layer size.
The network training data is obtained through the process
of block image segmentation, where the entire image is divided
into rectangular NxN blocks. Each block is vectorised to form
a feature vector that is used both as an input and as a target
vector during the training process. Thus, the image
segmentation block size is directly related to the dimensionality
of the input feature vectors. Generally, the most important
aspects in the artificial neural network design are related to the
network architecture and the choice of training method. The
choice of image segmentation block size and the choice for the
number of neurons in the hidden layer of the network will have
a direct effect on the attained compression ratios.
Fig.2. Self-organizing maps
Their effect on the quality of image reconstruction will be
further studied in this paper. This paper will consider two
neural network training methods, specifically backpropagation
(gradient descent) and Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG)
algorithm. Supervised network learning is an iterative
procedure of a general form:
w m+1 = w m + w m = w m + um p m , m 0 (1)
, where w denotes the weight at mth iteration, and u and p
represent the learning rate and the direction of weight
adaptation, respectively. While the weight update under
standard backpropagation is in the negative direction of the
error function gradient, the conjugate gradient search uses the
second order approximation of the error function. Conjugate
gradient methods are well suited to handle large-scale problems
in an effective way [25, 26]. Scalable conjugate gradient
adopts the Levenberg-Marquardt approach to scale the learning
rate and is demonstrated to be significantly faster than the
standard backpropagation and other CGM methods [26].
B. Kohonens Self-Organized Maps
Kohonens Self Organizing Maps (SOM) correspond to a
feed-forward artificial neural with a single computational layer
that adopts an unsupervised competitive form of learning to
produce a low-dimensional representation of the input space.
SOMs are able to adaptively transform any incoming signal
pattern of arbitrary dimension into a low-dimensional map, and
in the process preserve the topological ordering. Although,
higher dimensional maps are also possible, Kohonens self-
organizing maps are typically used to produce one or two
dimensional discrete maps. Fig. 2. illustrates a self-organizing
map with a two-dimensional grid topology.
The process of self-organization involves four distinct
elements: a) Initialization, where small random values are
assigned to connection weights; b) Competition, where a
discriminant function is used to declare a single neuron as a
competition winner; c) Cooperation, where a spatial location of
a topological neighborhood, as determined by the location of
the winning neuron, provides the basis for cooperation among
neighboring neurons; d) Adaptation, where connection weights
are adjusted in order to decrease the corresponding discriminant
function values in relation to the input pattern. In this paper,
Euclidian distance is adopted as a discriminant function and the
weight update rule is defined as:
w = (x i wji) (2) entirety. In the next stage, the outputs of this artificial neural
, where represents the ith element in the input pattern x. Here,
denotes the network weight connecting the ith input unit and
the jth neuron in the output layer, while represents the labeled ANN 2 to ANN M, are trained to process only the
size of topological neighborhood as a function of winning
neuron index I(x) and time (epoch). Finally, weight update uses
an exponentially decreasing time-dependent learning rate,
denoted as . In this paper, one-dimensional self-organizing
maps are used to partition the input space into a small number
of subspaces and as such facilitate the use of multiple finely
tune multilayer perceptrons to perform image compression.
Fig.3. Block diagram of the encoder
Fig.4. Image reconstruction
III. IMAGE COMPRESSION
Fig. 3 illustrates the proposed image compression method.
In the first stage of the image compression process, a computed
tomography image of lungs is segmented into rectangular NxN
blocks. The blocks are converted into a vector form to produce
the input and the target patterns for the supervised artificial
neural network learning. The training of the artificial neural
network, labeled ANN, involves the available dataset, in its
network are passed to Kohonens self-organizing map to
partition the feature space and enable training of multiple
artificial neural networks in the subsequent stage of the image
compression process. Multiple artificial neural networks,
specific input subspaces as defined by the trained self-
organizing map. The design of each artificial network involves
two stages. Firstly, all individual artificial neural networks, in
this hierarchical layer of the encoder, are initialized as the
previously trained ANN, where the entire available dataset is
used to train the neural network. Subsequently, each neural
network is trained on a particular subset of available feature
vectors. This two stage process ensures that each of the
networks, ANN 1 to ANN M, represent a finely tuned version of
the ANN network that are specifically designed to process
particular input subspace.
After the training of unsupervised and supervised neural
networks is completed, the process of image encoding is rather
straightforward. Image segmentation and vectorization
transforms an image into a set of feature vectors. Each of these
vectors is allocated to one particular finely tuned neural network
according to the SOM outputs. A particular neural network
processes the feature vector, and its hidden layer outputs are
passed to the decoder. Since the number of hidden layers is
significantly less than the feature vector length, image
compression is achieved.
The process of image reconstruction is illustrated in Fig. 4.
In the decoder design, the principal challenge presents a fact that
the decoder inputs can come from M different artificial neural
networks in the encoder and the decoder must ascertain from
which specific neural network it comes from before it can make
an accurate reconstruction of that specific image segment. Thus,
the decoder functionality requires two distinct stages, allocation
of encoder input to a specific neural network, and the
reconstruction of an image segment associated with that encoder
input.
In general, the reconstruction of image segments requires
only a part of the ANN structure that links the hidden layer
outputs to the ANN outputs. In order to make this distinction
clear, superscript H is used to denote that the reduced neural
network structure. Thus, ANNH represents the reduced ANN
network.
Initially, in the process of neural network identification, a
coarse reconstruction of the feature vectors is performed. At this
stage, when the encoder input is not associate with a particular
finely tuned network, ANN constitutes the best means for
feature vector reconstruction. This neural network can be
thought of as the average of the set of finely tuned networks.
The ANNH outputs are passed to the SOM network, where the
reconstructed feature vector is associate with the particular
finally tuned neural network.
In the second stage, an improved reconstruction of the
feature vector can be obtained. If a particular encoder input is a
result of some feature vector being processed by the ith neural
network, ANN i at the encoder, by correctly identifying the ith
neural network at the decoder, ANNH i can be used to obtain a
more accurate reconstruction of that feature vector. Once the
feature vectors are reconstructed, the invers process of images
segmentation and vectorization can be imposed to reconstruct
the image.
Note that the performance of image reconstruction relies on
the assumption that neural network identification can be
performed with high levels of accuracy. The results of
experimental evaluation presented later in this paper will show
that this is indeed the case.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The experiments are conducted on a subset of the ELAP
database that includes 20 CT images of lungs [27]. An
example of a 512 x 512, 8-bit image from the selected database
subset is presented in Fig. 5. a). The entire ELCAP public
image database consists of an image set of 50 low-dose
documented whole-lung CT scans, obtained in a single breath
hold with a 1.25 mm slice thickness.
The quality of image reconstruction is reported in terms of
objective image quality metrics, namely mean square error
(MSE), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). The mean
square error of the reconstructed image is defined as
(3)
, where X and R denote the original and the reconstructed
mxn images, respectively. On the other hand, the peak signal-
to-noise ratio (in dB) is defined as:
(4) reported in Table I. The average improvements in the image
, where describes the maximum possible pixel value
of the image X, while B denotes the number of bits per sample.
The reported results constitute the average PSNR and MSE
across the database of CT images of lungs.
One of the objectives of this paper is to study the how
different options for the artificial neural network training
method, network architecture and the image segmentation
block size affect the quality of image reconstruction, in terms
of defined objective quality measures. For this purpose a single
artificial neural network is used to perform image compression
and image reconstruction.In the first experiment, image
compression performance for a choice of two neural network
training algorithms is evaluated. Specifically, scaled conjugate
gradient algorithm is compared to Backpropagation (gradient
descent), which is commonly reported in literature as the
principal choice of network training method [18].
Fig. 5. a) An example of CT lung image; the results of applying the proposed
method b) N=4, H=8, PSNR=32.93 dB; c) N=8, H=8, PSNR=28.31 dB; d)
N=16, H=6, PSNR=25.16 dB
TABLE I. IMAGE COMPRESSION PERFORMANCE FOR DIFFERENT
CHOICES OF NETWORK TRAINING ALGORITHM
Number of neurons in the hidden layer
Training
Algorithm H=4 H=6 H=8 H=10 H=12
Backprop 25.71 26.83 27.23 28.01 28.37
SCG 26.67 27.76 28.04 28.88 29.25
In this experiment, the image segmentation block size is
kept constant, 8x8, while the number of hidden neurons is
varied between 4 and 12 in increments of 2. The results are
compression across the range of selected hidden layer neuron
numbers is 0.89 dB. The biggest reported difference in the
performances of two algorithms is 0.96 dB, which corresponds
to the neural network with 4 hidden layer neurons. These
results clearly show the scaled conjugate gradient is a more
effect option for training the artificial neural network to perform
image compression compared to the more commonly used
backpropagation algorithm. Inherent complexity of the training
process that is involved in the applications of artificial neural
network to image compression is the principal reason why the
choice of network training algorithm can influence the
compression performance significantly.
Let us consider the previous example. Here image
segmentation is based on 8x8 blocks and thus each feature
vector consists of 64 elements. Furthermore, for a single
512x512 image, there are 4096 feature vectors in a training set.
Considering the overall dimensionality of the training set, it is
clear that neural network based image compression requires an TABLE II. PSNR VALUES FOR DIFFERENT CHOICES OF BLOCK SIZE AND
THE NUMBER OF HIDDEN NEURONS
efficient neural network learning algorithm.
NxN Block Number of neurons in the hidden layer
Since, it has been demonstrated that the scaled conjugate
Size H=4 H=6 H=8 H=10 H=12 H=16
gradient outperforms the backpropagation algorithm in ANN
applications to CT image compression, in all the remaining 4x4 29.72 31.22 32.63 34.28 36.14 36.8
experiments only the scaled conjugate gradient algorithm is 8x8 26.67 27.76 28.04 28.88 29.25 29.84
used to perform supervised neural network learning.
16x16 24.22 24.83 25.90 26.46 26.70 27.55
In the next experiment, various neural network
architectures are examined. The number of elements in the
TABLE III. MSE VALUES FOR DIFFERENT CHOICES OF BLOCK SIZE AND
input layer are directly related to the size of blocks used to THE NUMBER OF HIDDEN NEURONS
perform image segmentation. In order to avoid image
truncation or padding, only 4x4, 8x8 and 16x16 blocks are Number of neurons in the hidden layer
NxN Block Size
considered. For each considered block size, the number of H=4 H=6 H=8 H=10 H=12 H=16
hidden layer neurons is varied in a range between 4 and 16. Let 4x4 69.36 49.10 35.49 24.27 15.82 13.59
us remind that at the neural network level, image compression
ratio is equated with the ratio between the size of the network 8x8 139.98 108.91 102.11 84.16 77.28 67.5
input layer and the size of the hidden layer. Thus, the highest 16x16 246.08 213.84 167.14 146.91 139.02 114.3
considered compression ratio is 64:1, while the lowest
considered CR value is 1.33:1.
TABLE IV. PROPOSED METHOD: PSNR FOR DIFFERENT CHOICES OF
The PSNR and MSE results are reported in Table II and BLOCK SIZE AND THE NUMBER OF HIDDEN NEURONS
Table III, respectively. These results demonstrate that Number of neurons in the hidden layer
irrespective of image segmentation block size and given that NxN Block Size
H=4 H=6 H=8 H=10 H=12 H=16
everything else is equal, the quality of the reconstructed image
increases with the increasing number of hidden layer neurons. 4x4 29.9 31.53 32.93 34.56 36.44 37.17
This is expected as any increase in the number of hidden layer 8x8 26.96 28.13 28.31 29.27 29.49 30.22
neurons lowers the compression ratio. It is worth noting that
16x16 24.53 25.16 26.23 26.83 27.05 27.89
for the same choice of hidden layer neuron number, the use of
16x16 segmentation blocks implies 4 times higher compression
ratio compared to the 8x8 blocks, and 16 times higher
When comparing the performance of the proposed method
compression ratio compared to the 4x4 blocks. This has to be
with the image compression performance based on a single
taken in consideration when interpreting the presented PSNR
neural network, on average the proposed method offers an
and MSE results. The PSNR and MSE values that are associated
improvement of 0.32 dB, across image segmentation block
with the 16x16 block size and H=16 are comparable to those
sizes and the hidden neuron numbers.
obtained for 8x8 block size and H=4. Similarly, the results
associated with the 8x8 block size and H=16 are comparable to The results of applying the proposed method on an
those obtained when 4x4 block size and H=4 hidden layer example of a CT lung image for three different neural network
neurons are used. architectures are shown in Fig. 5. Visual inspection of the
reconstructed images confirms the objective image quality
Thus, one can conclude that for the same compression
rating. When 16 x16 image segmentation is employed in
ratio, marginally better PSNR and MSE performances can be
conjunction with the hidden layer size of 6 neurons, to attain a
attained when the size of the image segmentation blocks is
compression ratio of 1:43, blocking effect becomes noticeable
higher. However, further increase in block size, e.g. 32 and
around the edge separating the lung CT image and the black
higher, significantly increases the feature vector
background.
dimensionality, which imposes a severe constrained on the
networks ability to learn and exploit spatial correlation that is It should be noted that any further fragmentation of the
present in the CT images of lungs. Another issue with small input space does not yield any notable improvements in the
image segmentation block size, e.g. 4x4 block size, places a image compression performance. Thus, these results are not
strong constraint on the compression ratios that can be reported
achieved. In the hidden layer, a neural network. There must be
a sufficient number of neurons in order to have meaningful As previously discussed in Section III, an important aspect
image reconstruction. of the decoder performance corresponds to the ability to
correctly relate the encoder inputs to the hidden layer outputs
In the final experiment, the proposed method is evaluated of a specific finely tuned neural network. On average, the
for a range of image segmentation block sizes and a range of evaluated network identification accuracy is 99.3%. The ability
hidden neuron numbers. The proposed method is realized on to correctly identify a finely tuned neural network is also
the basis of have two finely tuned ANN networks to perform evident in the overall improved image compression
image compression. The corresponding PSNR results are performance.
reported in Table IV.
 V. CONCLUSION
This paper studies the how different options for the image
segmentation block size, network architecture, and the training
method affect the image compression performance. An
attempt is made to optimize the performance of a neural
network based compression of computed tomography images
of lungs. The use of unsupervised form of learning, or
specifically, Kohonens self-organizing maps, to perform the
segmentation of feature space and the use of multiple neural
network architectures is also examined. The presented
experiments are performed on a database of 20 computed
tomography images of lungs and the results were reported in
terms of attained compression ratios and objective image
quality metrics, namely PSNR, and MSE. The results
demonstrate that the scaled conjugate gradient is a more
effective training algorithm, rather than backpropagation
algorithm in the application of the artificial neural networks to
image compression. The results of evaluating the image
compression performance across a range of image segmentation
block sizes and the hidden neuron numbers show that that for
the same compassion ratios, up to a certain point, an increasing
size of image segmentation blocks offer better performances.
Furthermore, it has been found that small image segmentation
blocks place a constraint on the ANNs ability to achieve high
compression ratios, while overly large image segmentations
blocks increase the feature space dimensionality and thus,
impair the capacity of an artificial neural network to learn. The
proposed algorithm offers performance improvements in the
compression of computed tomography images of lungs, across
a range of considered experimental setups.
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