Segmentation-based compression: New frontiers of telemedicine in telecommunication

•Segmentation-based compression scheme is proposed for new frontiers of telemedicine.•IWT can achieve more efficient computation and classification.•MVQ analyzes regions with different compression rates according to their importance.•Proposed system is robust suitable for telemedicine application in telecommunication.

This study proposes a novel segmentation-based compression scheme for new frontiers of telemedicine in telecommunication, where the aim is to improve the information transfer and communication between patients and medical staffs in telemedicine. The system mainly consists of improved watershed transform and modified vector quantization. Improved watershed transform is proposed to segment a medical image into several closed regions via region growing, which can achieve more efficient computation and classification. Modified vector quantization is proposed to analyze these regions with different compression rates according to the importance of the regions to simultaneously preserve important features and reduce the size of images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system is robust and performs better than several previous methods. It is also suggested being suitable for the applications of telemedicine in telecommunication.