In recent years

image acquisition equipment has been widely adopted in the field of well logging. However

the data transfer rate of the logging system is limited by the transmission cables. Thus

data compression is necessary

but the common compression schemes were found to be not ideal for the well logging images

which have unique properties. In this paper

the properties of typical ultrasonic well logging images were studied and a suitable compression algorithm was proposed. Row and column correlation was found to be the major characteristic of the well logging images and 2 D correlation was not significant. Some subimages showed mainly row correlation and others showed mainly column correlation. According to this observation

an adaptive predictive lossless image compression coding based on image segmentation was proposed. An image is decomposed into blocks and pre row or pre column prediction is adaptively selected for every block to perform DPCM coding. An improved LZW algorithm is used to be encode the prediction error. Experiments showed that this coding scheme was able to achieve higher compression ratios than lossless JPEG and JPEG|LS for the ultrasonic well logging image

while the complexity was comparable. The algorithm is self|adaptive and thus no code table is needed. Since every block is independently processed

the error propagation problem associated with normal DPCM coding schemes is avoided.