Chapter 7. Image Compression

Compression may be mathematically lossless or lossy. The more the visual-quality degradation (loss) that can be tolerated, the higher the compression ratio will be. Compression of images without significant loss of perceived quality is possible because images contain a high degree of i) spatial redundancy, due to correlation between neighboring pixels, ii) spectral redundancy, due to correlation among color components, and iii) psychovisual redundancy, due to what the human eye cannot see. The more the redundancy, the higher the achievable compression will be.

The need for effective data compression is evident in almost all applications where storage and transmission of digital images are involved. For example, an ...

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