DNA microarray technologies enable the analysis of the expression of numerous genes in an individual experiment and become an important approach in the field of medicine and biology for investing genetic function, regulation, and interaction. Microarray images can be investigated well for obtaining the contained genetic data. But is it undesirable to retain the genetic data and avoid the microarray images? Due to considerable attention to DNA microarray and several experiments being performed under distinct conditions, a massive quantity of data gets produced over the globe. In order to store and share the microarray images, effective storage and communication models are needed in a natural way. Vector quantization (VQ) is a commonly utilized tool for compressing images, which mainly aims to produce effective codebooks comprising a collection of codewords. Therefore, this paper presents a manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO) with Linde–Buzo–Gray (LBG) based microarray image compression (MRFOLBG-MIC) technique. The LBG model is commonly utilized to design local optimal codebooks to compress images. The construction of codebooks can be defined as a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP) hard problem and can be resolved by the MRFO algorithm. The codebooks produced from LBG-VQ are optimized using the MRFO algorithm to attain optimum optimal codebooks. When the codebooks are produced by the MRFOLBG-MIC algorithm, Deflate model can be applied to compress the index tables. The design of the MRFO algorithm with LBG and Deflate based index table compression demonstrate the novelty of the work. For demonstrating the enhanced compression efficacy of the MRFOLBG-MIC model, a wide-ranging experimental validation process is performed using a benchmark dataset. The experimental outcomes inferred that the MRFOLBG-MIC model accomplished superior outcomes over the other existing models.