A lossless biosignal compression technology developed by South Korean researchers has been adopted as an international standard.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said on Tuesday its in-house biosignal compression technology was incorporated into an international standard for biosignal and general waveform compression jointly promoted by the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

The standard was approved in July as ITU-T Recommendation T.261 and MPEG-D Part 8. ETRI said 2 core compression technologies were included and it also served as an editor of the standard document.

The biosignal and general waveform compression international standard (H.BWC) is a technology that losslessly compresses biosignals such as electroencephalograms, electrocardiograms and electromyograms, as well as general waveform data. Unlike DICOM in the medical imaging field, there had effectively been no international standard for biosignal compression.

The technologies ETRI incorporated into the standard are predictive coding based on prior prediction and channel coding based on electrode placement.

The predictive coding based on prior prediction reduces data volume by predicting the next value based on the previous signal and encoding only the difference from the actual value. The channel coding based on electrode placement improves compression efficiency without additional computational burden by reducing information recorded redundantly across multiple channels during EEG measurement.

ETRI also secured 2 international standard patents related to the technology. The technology is expected to be used not only for large-scale biosignal storage and transmission by medical institutions, but also for telemedicine, wearable healthcare and AI-based precision diagnosis.

It can also be applied to compression of general waveform data such as industrial sensors and vibration analysis. The lossless compression technology was also adopted as an MPEG audio compression standard for machines.

Kang Jung-won (강정원), head of ETRI's Media Coding Research Section, said, "It is meaningful that domestic technology has been recognized as a core component of an international standard." He added, "We will advance biosignal and immersive media compression technologies and lead international standardization."