ABSTRACT
Thermal medical images are recorded and saved in digital form. Yet often little thought is given on the format the data is stored. In this chapter we stress the need for a standardized format for storing medical infrared images. We then evaluate several algorithms that allow thermograms to be stored in compressed form, resulting in reduced utilization of resources such as disk space or bandwidth. While storage is usually solely done for archival and legal reasons we further introduce an approach that retrieves thermograms that are similar to a given image and that are hence also likely to be medically relevant. Finally, we introduce a system that allows to visually browse a whole database of thermal medical images.
