Annually 8500 neonatal deaths are reported in the US due to respiratory failure, this is a third of all neonatal deaths in the US. Recently, Lung Ultrasound (LUS), due to its ionizing-radiation free nature, portability, and being cheaper is gaining wide acceptability as a diagnostic tool used for lung diseases. However, lack of highly trained medical professional has limited its use especially in remote areas. To address this, an automated screening system that captures characteristics of the LUS patterns can be of significant assistance to clinicians who are not experts in lung ultrasound (LUS) images. In this paper, we propose a feature extraction method designed to quantify the spatially-localized line patterns and texture patterns found in LUS images. Using the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) and four types of common image features we propose a method to classify the LUS images into 6 common neonatal lung conditions. These conditions are normal lung, pneumothorax (PTX), transient tachypnea of the newborn (TTN), respiratory distress syndrome (RDS), chronic lung disease (CLD) and consolidation (CON) that could be pneumonia or atelectasis. The proposed method using DTCWT decomposition extracted global statistical, grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), grey-level run length matrix (GLRLM) and linear binary pattern (LBP) features to be fed to a linear discriminative analysis (LDA) based classifier. Using 15 best DTCWT features along with 3 clinical features the proposed approach achieved a per-image classification accuracy of 92.78% with a balanced dataset containing 720 images from 24 patients and 74.39% with the larger (class unbalanced) dataset containing 1550 images from 42 patients.

The deep learning revolution incited by the 2012 Alexnet paper has been transformative for the field of computer vision. Many problems which were severely limited using classical solutions are now seeing unprecedented success. The rapid proliferation of deep learning methods has led to a sharp increase in their use in consumer and embedded applications. One consequence of consumer and embedded applications is lossy multimedia compression which is required to engineer the efficient storage and transmission of data in these real-world scenarios. As such, there has been increased interest in a deep learning solution for multimedia compression which would allow for higher compression ratios and increased visual quality. The deep learning approach to multimedia compression, so called Learned Multimedia Compression, involves computing a compressed representation of an image or video using a deep network for the encoder and the decoder. While these techniques have enjoyed impressive academic success, their industry adoption has been essentially non-existent. Classical compression techniques like JPEG and MPEG are too entrenched in modern computing to be easily replaced. This dissertation takes an orthogonal approach and leverages deep learning to improve the compression fidelity of these classical algorithms. This allows the incredible advances in deep learning to be used for multimedia compression without threatening the ubiquity of the classical methods. The key insight of this work is that methods which are motivated by first principles, i.e., the underlying engineering decisions that were made when the compression algorithms were developed, are more effective than general methods. By encoding prior knowledge into the design of the algorithm, the flexibility, performance, and/or accuracy are improved at the cost of generality...