Image compression

Image compression is a type of data compression applied to digital images, to reduce their cost for storage or transmission. Algorithms may take advantage of visual perception and the statistical properties of image data to provide superior results. With image compression, the amount of data required to represent an image is reduced.

Overview

Image compression may be lossy or lossless. Lossless compression is preferred for archival purposes and often for medical imaging, technical drawings, clip art, or comics. Lossy compression methods, especially when used at low bit rates, introduce compression artifacts. Lossy methods are especially suitable for natural images such as photographs in applications where minor (sometimes imperceptible) loss of fidelity is acceptable to achieve a substantial reduction in bit rate.

Lossless compression

Lossless compression methods may be categorized according to the type of data they are designed to compress. While, in principle, any general-purpose lossless compression algorithm (general-purpose means the algorithm can accept any bitstring) can be used on any type of data, many are unable to achieve significant compression on data that are not of the form for which they were designed to compress.

Lossy compression

Lossy image compression is used in digital cameras, to increase storage capacities with minimal degradation of picture quality. Similarly, DVDs use the lossy MPEG-2 Video codec for video compression.

In lossy compression, data reduction may be achieved by removing unnecessary information, and the process is often done in the frequency domain.

See also

• Data compression
• Lossless compression
• Lossy compression

References

Image compression Resources
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