Abstract

The development of microarray technology has been remarkable, and it is becoming a daily tool in many genomic research laboratories. The widespread adoption of this technology, coupled with the signifi- cant volume of data generated per experiment, in the form of images, has led to significant challenges in storage and query-retrieval. In this paper, we present a lossless bitplane based method for efficient com- pression of microarray images. This method is based on arithmetic coding driven by image-independent multi-bitplane finite-context models. It produces an embedded bitstream that allows progressive, lossy-to-lossless decoding. The compression results obtained by using a large set of images are compared with three image coding stan- dards, namely, lossless JPEG2000, JBIG and JPEG-LS stated in the literature. The proposed method gives better results for all images of the test set.