MacResearch

We have been looking into file formats for biological images, which often come in the form of sequences of 12/16-bit greyscale images. It might be useful to store these in a standard video container such as MPEG-4, but they would need to be stored in an appropriate lossless codec that supported 12-bit greyscale. My suspicion is that this would give a better compression ratio than storing individual frames separately as a series of TIFF files, say (which effectively only gives intra-frame compression, and no inter-frame compression).

I haven't been able to find any information on any suitable codecs, though. I suspect there is no reason in principle that standard algorithms such as those behind H.264 should not perform well on 12-bit greyscale, but maybe the actual specified codec assumes 8-bit RGB.

Can anybody comment on this? (even if only to confirm that I should give up looking?)

Thanks in advance
Jonny