A Review of Contemporary Image Compression Techniques and Standards

Uncompressed multimedia data such as images require huge storage space, processing power, transmission time, and bandwidth. In order to reduce the storage space, transmission time, and bandwidth, the uncompressed image data is compressed before its storage or transmission. This process not only permits a large number of images to be stored in a specified amount of storage space but also reduces the time required for them to be sent or download from the internet. In this chapter, the classification of an image on the basis of number of bits used to represent each pixel of the digital image and different types of image redundancies is presented. This chapter also introduced image compression and its classification into different lossless and lossy compression techniques along with their advantages and disadvantages. Further, discrete cosine transform, its properties, and the application of discrete cosine transform-based image compression method (i.e., JPEG compression model) along with its limitations are also discussed in detail.