Image codec support in Silverlight mdcm

In my Silverlight adaptation of the mdcm DICOM class library, image codec support is only barely existing. The only fully supported codec is the RLE (Run Length Encoding) format, which is also provided as a fully .NET managed implementation in the main mdcm library.

There are a number of image files in various compression formats available for testing here. I have used these images to verify that RLE compressed files can indeed be decoded by the Silverlight mdcm library.

I have also attempted to implement JPEG codec support in the Silverlight library, but I have not yet been successful. Since I am limited to fully .NET managed implementations of JPEG encoding and decoding, there are only very few open-source alternatives available.

I have thus far only identified the following two open-source alternatives:

• FJCore
• LibJpeg.Net

The former is a codec library developed practically from scratch, whereas the latter library is a C# adaptation of the LibJpeg library originally developed by the Independent JPEG Group. Neither of the above implementations appear to support images with precision larger than 8 bits. More often than not, the precision of DICOM images is 12 bits, so neither FJCore nor LibJpeg.Net seem to be capable of providing sufficient JPEG codec support in the DICOM context at this stage.

As a sidenote, Leadtools provide codecs for JPEG and several other image formats in its DICOM Silverlight SDK. This SDK however comes at a price...