Sunday, March 29, 2015

Types of image compression

General Block Diagram of Image Compression
 
Image compression can be categorized in the following two categories.
Lossy Compression
Lossless Compression
Lossy compression technique of image compression involves eliminating redundant information in an image. During reconstruction of the original image this redundant information cannot be recovered. Such a method is used in applications where minor loss of fidelity is acceptable in order to achieve a substantial reduction in the overall size of the image and thereby reduction in the bit rate.

Lossless compression technique of image compression involves reconstructing the original image by recovering every single bit. Such a method is used in applications where even a minor loss of data is not acceptable.

Lossy compression is a popular method because it reduces the size of the file and thereby facilitates in file storage. An application of Lossy Compression is for storing photographs for personal use.

Lossless compression is preferred for archival purposes and often for medical imaging, technical drawings, which requires higher level of precision
Methods for Lossy Compression:
·         Chroma sub sampling
·         Transform coding
·         Quantization

Methods for Lossless Compression:
·         Run-length encoding
·         DPCM and Predictive Coding
·         Entropy encoding
Formats of Lossy Compression: TIFF, MNG, JPEG

Formats of Lossless Compression: PNG, GIF, RAW