Abstract

For the past few years, a joint ISO/CCITT committee known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has been working to establish the first international compression standard for continuous tone still images, both grayscale and color. JPEG’s proposed standard aims to be generic, to support a wide variety of applications for continuous tone images. To meet the differing needs of many applications, the JPEG standard includes two basic compression methods, each with various modes of operation. A DCT based method is specified for “lossy’’ compression, and a predictive method for “lossless’’ compression. JPEG features simple lossy technique known as the Baseline method, a subset of the other DCT based modes of operation. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) is a technique for converting a signal into elementary frequency components. It is widely used in image compression. Here we develop some simple functions to compute the DCT and to compress images. The rapid growth of digital imaging applications, including desktop publishing, multimedia, teleconferencing, and high-definition television (HDTV) has increased the need for effective and standardized image compression techniques. Among the emerging standards are JPEG, for compression of still images.

Authors and Affiliations