MPEG

[dwballance]

Hi!

I have been hearing a little recently about the DICOM standard's [relatively] new MPEG support. Does DCMTK have any facilities that would accomodate that functionality? Would the MPEG binary image data just be added as the image object to the DICOM file object?

Alternatively...given an M-JPEG-compressed AVI, is there a relatively simple way to construct a DICOM object out of that? What I have been doing so far (with your assistance, thank you!) is to build up a multi-frame image using individual frames from the AVI. That's painful, of course, because a 1.5 Mb file bloats into 50 MB pretty quickly...I'd love to be able to use the compressed data.

--Dennis

[Marco Eichelberg]

The current release has no support for the MPEG transfer syntax. The next release will at least "know" this transfer syntax, i.e. allow such objects to be parsed, transmitted, loaded and stored. We are not currently planning to implement any MPEG encoding or decoding facility, i.e. the MPEG stream would just be handled as an opaque byte stream.
Concerning your particular problem, if you can access individual JPEG images from the M-JPEG stream and if these individual images are correct baseline JPEG (which you need to check since M-JPEG is not standardised and each vendor implements their own encoding), you could directly convert that into a DICOM multiframe image in JPEG Baseline transfer syntax which would have a very small overhead over the AVI source.